Detroit's problems are opportunities, or at least from the viewpoint of Entrepreneur magazine. It inducted the Motor City into its list of Top 50 innovative cities.

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Detroit sits poised on the brink of economic collapse--and on the cusp of a post-industrial renaissance. Artists and iconoclasts are moving to this city in droves, purchasing foreclosed properties and relying on solar energy and other alternative solutions to pursue lives and careers outside the margins of mainstream society. Officials are looking to reinvent blighted segments of the city as urban farms. Detroit is dead--long live Detroit.

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Downtown Detroit is becoming more and more of a tech-based place. It doesn't hurt that Quicken Loans is moving there and rebranding the city center's main drag WEBward Avenue.

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Dan Gilbert, the chairman and founder of Quicken Loans, is hoping that if he declares Woodward Avenue, Detroit's main drag, to be a new, tech-centered "WEBward Avenue" often enough, it just might come true. It also doesn't hurt that he has the money and clout to perhaps make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That's why the businessman, who also owns the Cleveland Cavaliers, is screaming to the rafters today about something completely unrelated to LeBron James's move to Miami. Gilbert announced yesterday that Quicken's sister company, Quizzle, will join Quicken when it moves into the Compuware building in Detroit later this month. Quizzle is a financial website with more than 500,000 registered users, according to the company, that helps consumers manage their personal finances.

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People often talk about the need for Metro Detroit to harness its vast musical culture. It actually works the other way around with local musicians harnessing the region's culture to drive musical innovation. The most recent example is how a Metro Detroiter invented Techno and how local musicians are still harnessing it and the region for inspiration.

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Berry Gordy Jr., founder of Motown Records, claimed that Detroit’s assembly lines inspired the sound of his label’s music. The originators of techno dance music, which also got its start in the city, were subject to these surrounding influences, as well, though the mood of the town had changed dramatically by the early 1980s.

"Detroit is a cold place with a heart made of metal," said Michael Banks, a producer and co-founder of Underground Resistance, a politically charged techno outfit in Detroit.
"For me, the car industry affected techno music by its efficiency aspects," Mr. Banks, who also records under the name Mad Mike, explained.

Juan Atkins, a Detroit music producer, is widely credited with inventing the techno genre. He coined the term in 1984 from the novel "Future Shock" by Alvin Toffler. That same year, Mr. Atkins released the song "Techno City," a recording that popularized the word in Europe.

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Detroiters know how to hustle. Bizdom U knows how to run a successful start-up. Quicken Loans Founder Dan Gilbert is putting the two together in an effort to reinvent Metro Detroit's economy. The New York Times takes an in-depth look at the initiative.

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James Smith Moore, the son of a single mother on Detroit's east side, knows how to hustle.

He started a lizard-breeding business at age 15 and sold more than 500 hatchlings online for $15 to $80 apiece.

At 16, after local stores ran out of a certain popular Nike sneaker, he hired a manufacturer in China to supply him with knock-offs, which he sold for $80 to $200 a pair on his own Web site as well as eBay and other auction sites. Four months later, he received a cease-and-desist letter, but he had made a $14,000 profit, enough to buy his first car.

This bootstrapping spirit got Mr. Moore, now 21, accepted into Bizdom U, an intense boot camp for aspiring entrepreneurs who aim to start high-growth businesses in Detroit. Bizdom U is the brainchild of Dan Gilbert, a Motor City native who is founder and chairman of the online mortgage lender Quicken Loans. He also hopes to help revitalize his hometown.

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Why will Rustbelt cities like Detroit fare better than Sunbelt cities in the 21st Century? We're not making sunshine for senior citizens -- we make real stuff and know how to innovate our way out of tough times.

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And now for a few promising words about old industrial towns ...

Traditional industrial centers such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and yes, even Detroit, may fare better in recovering from the current economic funk than so-called "bubble cities" such as Las Vegas, Tampa, Miami or Riverside, Calif., said Bruce Katz, founding director of the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program.

At a recent London School of Economics symposium on U.S. and European cities, Katz said American bubble cities are characterized by "real estate economies built on consumption and excess."

More mature industrial centers, he said, tend to have strong universities and a history of research, innovation and making things. If America is going to "rediscover our innovation mojo," as Katz put it, traditional industrial metros are best equipped to lead the way.

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Local Metro Detroit leaders are singing the praises of Tennessee-based Vanguard Health Systems purchase of the Detroit Medical Center, but here is what the people from the Volunteer State are saying about it.

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Vanguard Health Systems Inc.'s plans to acquire The Detroit Medical Center moved a step closer to reality when the parties signed a final purchase agreement late Thursday.

The signing comes nearly three months after Nashville-based Vanguard announced a letter of intent to acquire Michigan's largest provider of care to the poor, uninsured and underinsured for $417 million cash and a commitment to spend $850 million over five years on capital projects.

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The new news site in town takes on Metro Detroit's emerging venture capital scene and the streak of investments it has been on lately.

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There are three reasons Michigan can feel good about a recent $8 million venture capital investment in Detroit-based medical imaging company Delphinus Medical Technologies.

• It is an investment in a Michigan company;
• The investment comes from an all-Michigan VC team;
• It is an investment in Michigan-grown technology developed in one of the state's premier research institutions—one that deals with real-life cancer cases every day.

Delphinus Medical’s breast-cancer-detection technology, SoftVue, has been undergoing development at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit for the past 10 years. Unlike mammography, it does not use radiation or compression to image the breast to detect early stages of breast cancer.

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There hasn't been a shortage of interesting, weird, off-the-wall art coming out of Detroit lately. And this is no different. Local artist Clinton Snider has created "House 365." It's a small wooden cottage, modeled after some of the old housing stock still in Detroit. It's an homage to when vacancies weren't the norm. It's small like a dollhouse, but don't call it that.

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"House 365" is Snider's homage to old Detroit. As the city pulls down derelict homes, the result is a gap-toothed landscape he finds haunting and mournful.

So he decided to make his own weathered wreck, a talisman from a vanishing Detroit. (For the record, he applauds clearing out blight. He just regrets the loss of that turn-of-the-century clapboard landscape.)

So what do you do with a tiny house that looks like a prop from the opening credits of "The Beverly Hillbillies?"

First Snider thought he'd move the house every day and photograph it (hence the "365"), an idea he now calls "far-fetched." Instead, he presented the house at an opening last year at Hazel Park's Tank gallery and invited visitors to sign up for a month's "deed" to the property.

And that's how the wee house landed in artist Mary Fortuna's front yard in Royal Oak.
"I was totally engaged with the sweetness of it," she says. "It's like Clint's paintings in 3-D."

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