Detroit : In the News

Seems like everybody wants to stake their claim as the 'next' Silicon Valley. To be honest, the moniker is getting a little long in the tooth. That said, some are making the case that Detroit is a city to watch when it comes to interesting start-ups and tech trends.

The report:



Read more about it here. And here.

Yeah, it gets kind of mushy in that let's-cheer-for-the-underdog kind of way. But it sure is nice to see that someone appreciates how Metro Detroit is getting back on its feet and charting a better course for the future. Or, at least, a tastier course for the future.

Excerpt:

"And how. During the 48 hours I spent in Detroit, I met enthusiastic black, white and Asian people, from age 10 to over 60, almost all of whom agreed that food is the key to the new Detroit.

I was driven around the city by Dan Carmody, director of the 120-year-old Eastern Market, whose huge sheds are crammed with vendors on Saturdays, when as many as 50,000 shoppers buy everything from Grown in Detroit vegetables to Michigan asparagus to flats of flowers to hydroponic tomatoes. In other words, a typical big-city covered market mash-up.

But if the market is familiar, the rest of Detroit is anything but. Read the paper, and you see a wasted landscape; go there, and you see the sprouts emerging from the soil."

Read the rest of the story here.

In its roundup of where innovation is happening across the U.S., guess what Fast Company singled out for Michigan? Most people would guess Ann Arbor. And they'd be wrong. The answer is... ding, ding, ding... Detroit's TechTown.

Excerpt:

"A stunning factoid: The fastest-growing tech-job market in the U.S. over the past year was Detroit. A key part of the equation is TechTown, an incubator started in 2004 by Wayne State University that's now home to 220 firms."

Read the whole list here.

Motown goes au natural: With the city rethinking how it develops its less-populated landscape, the unearthing of long-buried rivers and streams suddenly sounds pretty attractive. First up, Bloody Run Creek on the city's east side. That name alone guaranteed this news story link.

Excerpt:

"The Kresge Foundation recently donated $450,000 to the University of Detroit Mercy's Detroit Collaborative Design Center to map plans for restoring Bloody Run Creek, the Detroit Free Press reported Monday. Such "daylighting" of urban creeks and streams has been embraced in cities throughout the world.

"It creates a cooling effect, literally a living air conditioner for the city, and makes a softer, greener, cooler landscape," said Shaun Nethercott, an environmentalist and founder of the Matrix Theatre in Detroit. "

Read the rest of the story here.

The Women Presidents' Organization has released its list of the Top 50 fastest growing women-led businesses, and three are in Metro-Detroit. These women have evaded the glass ceiling, barriers to financing, yadda, yadda, and are also breaking the stereotype that women are only interested in small lifestyle businesses.

Excerpt:

"...Women Presidents' Organization, a peer-advisory group for multimillion-dollar women-owned businesses, determined the Top 50 Fastest-Growing Women-Led Companies using a formula that combines percentage revenue growth and absolute growth. To be eligible for the list, companies must be privately owned, women-owned or led, and have generated at least $500,000 in annual revenue in 2006 and $2 million by year-end 2010, among other criteria. About 375 companies applied for inclusion on the list."

Read the full story here.

HuffPost blogger, Oakland University professor and Grosse Pointe resident Jason Schmitt reads into the genetic code of Metro Detroit's ever inventive and endlessly innovative rock scene and see a template for how new technology firms and entrepreneurial endeavors can find similarly earth-shattering successes.

Excerpt:

"If you are interested in corporate creativity, my first finding of pocketed communities takes the form of a "no duh." Nearly every creative-inspired leadership book I have read mentions the importance of keeping the creatives away from the nitty gritty. The importance of not micro-managing is brought up to allow the big ideas a culture in which to flourish. The interesting notion is to think of these ideas on a larger scope than the brick and mortar office. To zoom out and look at this as a more city culture than corporate philosophy. And to look at the ramifications that working from home can have on this process. Metro Detroit has enough room to allow distinct lifestyles to play out in separate Petri dishes. In a Second Life, 2.0, global access world, the dictates of "neighborhood" are changeable, sculptable, and extremely important.

Family-owned radio in Detroit is an interesting second ingredient to the homogenization kryptonite this region seems to possess. Plain and simple, Detroit is not as quick to pick up on national music trends. By not basking in the newest ideas, this region has maintained a more focused creative demeanor. Media that reflects the region's view and not national dictates, is extremely important. This finding makes reassessing your RSS feed content, and choosing what streams of information you want to seep into you, or your workforces' brain, more important.

The third finding is Detroiters make great audience members."

Read the rest of the story here.

Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant Sramana Mitra publishes an extended interview with Ross Sanders of Bizdom U on her website and leaves no stone unturned.

Excerpt:

"Could you describe an ideal company that would benefit from your program?

Ross: Most people that we bring into our program do not have established businesses. They are people who are seeking out ideas.

I can give you an example. There was a woman [Judy Davids] who had a lot of different ideas. She didn’t know which one to settle on, so we brought her into the program.

We went through several brainstorming exercises to flesh out her ideas and add new ideas to existing list, and she landed on one. We worked around with that idea and once we got fired up, we did a market and financial feasibility study, trying to figure out what are the economics of one unit are, and how she was going to make money.

Once we were done with that, we did a sales and marketing plan. We figured out what the sale process was, what the target market was, and how they were going to get to that target market. Then, we set goals. If you want to get to that target market, then you are going to have to set numerical goals for these different metrics in order to get to that market. "

Read the rest of the story here.

A key component of Detroit's revitalization involves attracting talent from across the nation to relocate to the 313. This idea just received a huge boost with the announcement of Wayne State's Detroit Fellows Program. Initial funding from the Kresge Foundation and the Hudson-Weber Foundation will make it possible for WSU to recruit and develop up to 25 outstanding mid-level candidates in the nonprofit and economic development spheres to relocate to Detroit for two years of grant-funded professional work.

During the first phase, Fellows will receive executive development training, as well as a two-year stint at participating organizations, including the University Cultural Center Association, NextEnergy, Downtown Detroit Partnership, Invest Detroit, the City of Detroit, the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation and the Woodward Corridor Initiative.

Excerpt:

"The Kresge Foundation is pleased to support Wayne State University in this unique endeavor to advance the revitalization of Detroit. As we align efforts to re-imagine Detroit, we hope to include a new generation of leaders from within the city and beyond," says Rip Rapson, President and CEO. "The Detroit Fellows Program will provide vital energy, high performance and capacity-building resources for Detroit as we maximize the opportunities before us."

Find out more about the Detroit Fellows program here.

Rolling Stone's Mark Binelli bucks local conventional wisdom to suggest that successful cities figure out how to grow, not shrink. He's not alone in his thinking.

Excerpt:

"Super-sizing Detroit could also translate to better policy. When Indianapolis enacted a similar "Unigov" city-suburbs merger in the late Sixties (under Republican mayor Dick Lugar), the region experienced economic growth (and the benefits of economy of scale), AAA municipal bond-ratings and a broader, more stable tax base. The same could happen in metropolitan Detroit, which sorely needs to attract young people and entrepreneurs in order to fill the void left by the region's dwindling manufacturing base. Elastic cities are less segregated and have fewer of the problems associated with concentrated areas of poverty. And though sprawl wouldn't necessarily be reigned in, the region could finally adopt a sensible transportation policy to unite its businesses and residential areas. At the moment, suburban Detroit maintains its own bus system, separate from the city's, and a planned $150 million light rail project, slated to run from downtown Detroit up the main thoroughfare of Woodward Avenue, would nonsensically stop at 8 Mile Road, the suburban border. That's a formula to limit, not maximize, growth."
 

Read the rest of the story here.

Metro Detroit isn't just reinventing its economy with dynamic new startups firmly rooted in the new economy. It's also reinventing its core automotive industry and posting some big victories with its efforts.

One of the biggest success stories is all about Ford, which CNBC featured in an hour-long documentary this week called Ford: Rebuilding an American Icon.