Global Detroit Entrepreneur in Residence Program

Global Detroit is a very interesting organization which is basically focused on economic development in Michigan and the general Detroit area.  Detroit has struggled economically.  Notably, Global Detroit has an Entrepreneur in Residence program which focuses on bringing foreign born entrepreneurs and their companies to Detroit/Michigan through working at a host university as a mentor.  Here is a success story:

Ashok Seetharam was living in Milwaukee when his startup, PAXAFE, began to take off. But he wasn’t sure he’d be able to stay. PAXAFE was Ashok’s third startup. After moving to the U.S. from India and graduating from Brown University with a graduate degree in Biomedical Engineering, he co-founded Orthopedix and led the company through XlerateHealth, an early-stage healthcare accelerator program. Orthopedix ultimately licensed its patented technology to a major orthopedic implant manufacturer. Next, he oversaw product development and a team of engineers for another healthcare startup, Toggle Health. 

In late 2018, Ashok and Ilya Preston founded PAXAFE in Milwaukee. Ilya’s family immigrated from Russia when he was a child. He and Ashok met at XlerateHealth in 2017. They originally helped kickstart a Minnesota startup focused on the transport of medical specimens, but ended up parting ways to start their own company. PAXAFE develops hardware and software IoT solutions that enable cheaper, intelligent shipping insurance. 

International startup founders face major challenges to launching their companies in the U.S. To remain in the country, they typically need an H-1B visa, which is available to foreign-born “specialty workers” in specific, largely high-tech fields. Ashok was permitted to remain in the U.S. for a short time on a different visa following his graduation from Brown, but he needed an H-1B visa to stay.

Fortunately for Ashok, in late 2018 Global Detroit launched a program called Global EIR. A partnership with the national Global EIR program, the program places foreign-born startup founders at universities to teach and mentor. By working at the university, Global EIRs are able to legally work in the US. This affords them the opportunity to launch their startups here and apply for a concurrent H-1B through their company. Global Detroit currently partners with the University of Michigan’s Economic Growth Institute on the program. Ashok was accepted, and PAXAFE moved their headquarters to Ann Arbor last summer. The company has recently closed on an additional $650,000 round of pre-seed funding, bringing their total raised in 2019 to almost $1 million. Working out of Ann Arbor SPARK, they have begun piloting their product and hiring for new positions.

“I didn’t think it was possible to continue building my company in the U.S. when I didn’t make the H-1B lottery,” Ashok recalls. “That all changed when I learned about Global Detroit and Global EIR. Not only did they help with my immigration through the Global EIR program but also continued to provide unparalleled support– both personally and with the business–which maximized our chance of success.”

Entrepreneurship and Innovation: When IP Does Not Seem to Matter

I am a big believer in "narrative". What I mean by "narrative" is the overarching framework of discourse that characterizes discussion about a given topic. Against that backdrop, I have been arguing, both in writing and in talks, that the rise of social media has brought in its wake a material decline in IP as part of the narrative on entrepreneurship and innovation. I have recently had two acute reminders of just how far IP has dropped out of this narrative.

The first reminder was in connection with a university programme on entrepreneurship for which I serve as a consultant. The purpose of the programme is to create an environment for the rapid fostering of start-ups. The programme has attracted international attention due to the number of successful exits that it has spawned. The downside to this obsession with quick exits is that the overwhelming number of start-ups are in the gaming and social media space, with students perceiving lower barriers to entry and where there exists a greater possibility of attracting a willing buyer at an early stage.

In that connection, I have for a number of years given an overview lecture of IP from the commercial perspective. Typically, following the lecture and running throughout the one year of the formal programme, several of the start-up groups consult with me about various IP aspects of their proposed ventures. I had noticed, however, that the number of such student inquiries has been steadily decreasing. How far IP had fallen was made clear following my recent lecture to the current intake.

I came away from the lecture thinking that the session had successfully introduced IP into the students' entrepreneurship narrative. Oh my, how wrong I was! The feedback was quick in coming and it was a stunner. "We found the topic to be totally irrelevant" was the view of most of the budding entrepreneurs in the class. IP was simply of no interest, not specifically to the various start-up projects and not more generally as part of the preferred intellectual arsenal of the young entrepreneurs. What the students want to learn about are issues of privacy, database protection and methods of online collection and payment. Whether I am the person best equipped to lecture on these topics remains an open question.

The second reminder arose in connection with a lengthy survey article-- "A Sense of Place: Technology and Geography", which appeared in the Oct. 27th issue of The Economist here. The focus of the article was to counter that view (promoted by The Economist itself in the 1990s) that digital and telephonic developments would result in the "death of distance." Au contraire--"Geography matters as much as ever, despite the digital revolution", says Patrick Lane, the author of the survey.

The first example brought in the article is a ride-sharing service in operation in San Francisco (where else?) whereby individual drivers "rent out" seats in their car, giving the owner of the service a 20% cut. The service works through a smartphone app, which effectively brings together a willing passenger and willing driver. The service is still dealing with issues of regulation and licensing. Participating drivers are identified by a pink-colored moustache on the front of the car, which is the trade mark for the service.

Try as I might, I could find no other discussion of intellectual property in the article, not in connection with the seat-rental service and not more generally in connection with other goods and services described. In describing entrepreneurial endeavours in the area of how technology is exploiting geographic proximity, IP is once again absent from the narrative.

With all of the media attention being devoted to the patent disputes involving the likes of Apple, Samsung, Google and HTC, the two instances described above are a useful and instructive antidote. Heavyweight patent cases make great theatre, but they do not reflect what is going on beneath the surface. At the level, the narrative of innovation and entrepreneurship is more and more uncoupling itself from traditional categories of IP.

"Boulevard of Broken Dreams": Late But Not Forgotten

A book review is a tricky matter. Being an author myself, I am never quite how sure what my role is as a reviewer. That is particularly so when the book that I am reviewing does not leave me with a favourable impression. To write a lukewarm review and potentially damage a fellow author's likelihood of success, or simply to decline to write a review in such circumstances. I am not sure of the correct answer.

Another circumstance for declining to review a book is the feeling that I am not really the right person for the job. That is the sense that I had when I received the book, Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Princeton University Press, here) by Professor Josh Lerner of the Harvard Business School. Lerner is that rare blend of world-class thinker with hands-on experience who has made major contributions to the way that we think about innovation and entrepreneurship. At the time that I received a copy--18 months ago, I did not think that I could do justice to the book. And so I demurred, as the book lay on my bookshelf, unread and unattended. Over the ensuing 18 months or so, however, I have found myself more and more drawn to the subject of Lerner's book, in practice, writing and teaching. Eventually I read the book itself from cover to cover and later relied on portions of the book in preparing a talk. I suddenly realized that I had been engaged by the book at multiple levels. I am now ready to write a review.

Lerner's book is really two books in one, each about 85 pages in length. The first, entitled "Can Bureaucrats Help Entrepreneurs?" is what Lerner calls the "39,000 foot" look at the public role of entrepreneurship and venture capital. The second part drills down a much more granular and local view of the subject. Three chapter headings are particularly telling: "How Governments Go Wrong, Bad Design" (chapter 6), How Governments Go Wrong, Bad Implementation" (chapter 7) and "The Special Challenges of Sovereign Funds" (chapter 8).

Despite the doom and gloom of these titles, his discussion reveals a much more mixed bag and two countries of particular interest to me--Singapore and Israel-- serve as positive (though not perfect by any means) models of the potential for government involvement in entrepreneurship. It is these latter chapter from which I drew insight and inspiration in preparing my own public talk.

So what do I make of the Lerner book? First and foremost, I could not shake the impression that each of these two parts should have been the subject of a separate book. Short of that, I would have preferred if Lerner had expanded the second part of the book and provide further discussion of developments on the ground. I relished his discussions in this regard and I had only one complaint when I came to the end of chapter 8--it is such a pity that there is not more of it. Indeed, I cannot say that the first part aided much in my understanding of Lerner's elegant and edifying exposition of the granularity of the intersection between government involvement and entrepreneurship.

Perhaps another of saying this is that I remain a skeptic about the extent to which one can draw more generalizable lessons from the examples that Lerner describes. Lerner is no deductionist, and he does not impose a top-down view of the subject, even in the first part of the book. However, even inductive conclusions from these latter chapters should be be treated with caution. It is true that Lerner addresses "Lessons and Pitfalls" in his final chapter, but I am not sure that his descriptions warrant these conclusions. There is nothing surprising here--the subject matter that Lerner addresses is inherently "messy" for any analytical treatment. In that connection, I recall the observation of the March 10, 2012 issue of The Economist in its concluding words of obituary in memory of the great Harvard social scientist James Q. Wilson:

"Problems remained, however. None was more thorny, for him, than the qualifying of evidence. Many of the social problems he pondered seemed to boil down to culture and ways of thinking. for which the data were ungathered and ungatherable. As a scientist, political or social, he needed to count and collate things to find the answers to his questions. But nothing that was really important about human beings, he [James Q. Wilson--njw] once said. could be measured in that fashion." 

Wilson may have been a bit too pessimistic about our ability to reach durable social truths about ourselves, including the world of entrepreneurship and innovation. That said, better for the reader to consider the chapters in part two of the book in depth and to draw his own conclusions, based on the reader's own experiences. This in my view is the special contribution of the Lerner book and why it is worthy of reading, more than once.