- Jun 12, 2001
- 8,757
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So I read this article about the Youngstown business incubator. It talked about the incubator switching to tech businesses, instead of general service providing, consumption models. It talked about a growing population of the people within the tech companies and the larger, outside the tech poorer people who used to rely on manufacturing and steel jobs.
The one thing that struck me was a quote by the manager of the incubator program, Jim Cossler.
Yes, there is. In any great incubator program, you embrace diversity, and I do not mean that by race alone. You foster the community to undertake challenges for the area and community. There is this idea that has been rampant that all you need is one great idea to make millions. It is the idea that you don't have to be wildly successful, just enough to unload the idea to one of the big ones (IBM, Google, hell even Facebook). But it is the same thing as pretending how you are going to spend those millions by winning the lottery. What you may have as an idea was most likely already thought of, not only in the US, but every Internet-capable as well. So the chances of hitting it big as your business driver will most likely be the least successful business you will ever attempt.
To Cussler, I would say, look beyond trying to foster the next Google, Uber or whatever. Look to what you already have in the incubator and match up new ventures with population in your area. Combine robotics, programming expertise with general manufacturing know-how to develop new techniques in qualitative machining. Develop better coal extraction with sensor arrays built with the anecdotal knowledge of experienced miners. And so on...
It is the everyone for themselves strategy that is slowly strangulating our can-do activism that made great things. So to Cossler I say, incubate the idea that all of Youngstown can participate.
The one thing that struck me was a quote by the manager of the incubator program, Jim Cossler.
Yes, there is. In any great incubator program, you embrace diversity, and I do not mean that by race alone. You foster the community to undertake challenges for the area and community. There is this idea that has been rampant that all you need is one great idea to make millions. It is the idea that you don't have to be wildly successful, just enough to unload the idea to one of the big ones (IBM, Google, hell even Facebook). But it is the same thing as pretending how you are going to spend those millions by winning the lottery. What you may have as an idea was most likely already thought of, not only in the US, but every Internet-capable as well. So the chances of hitting it big as your business driver will most likely be the least successful business you will ever attempt.
To Cussler, I would say, look beyond trying to foster the next Google, Uber or whatever. Look to what you already have in the incubator and match up new ventures with population in your area. Combine robotics, programming expertise with general manufacturing know-how to develop new techniques in qualitative machining. Develop better coal extraction with sensor arrays built with the anecdotal knowledge of experienced miners. And so on...
It is the everyone for themselves strategy that is slowly strangulating our can-do activism that made great things. So to Cossler I say, incubate the idea that all of Youngstown can participate.
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