About
by Bud Gibson, President of Michigan Innovators
Last May, I had a brainstorm. A couple of years prior, my wife and I had turned down an opportunity to move back East so we could stay and raise our boys in Michigan. Yet, all we seemed to hear about since was the impending death of the Michigan economy.
That wasn't the story I knew, at least not the entirety of it. So I started a Web site where I would post video interviews with people who seemed to be making it in Michigan, who seemed to be innovating and succeeding. I called the site MichiganInnovators.org mainly because the one thing I had learned from 10 years of college teaching was that it really paid to be clear and direct.
At the outset, however, I wasn't really sure what Michigan's innovation story was. The site was more of an exploration. Now with more than 120 interview segments under my belt, the people I've talked to have helped me understand some things.
First, as Larry Schmitt of Ann Arbor-based Inovo showed me last October, being an innovator is not about having new ideas. It's about getting ideas, sometimes not so new, accepted in a marketplace.
My case in point is Dave Henderson of Brighton's AutoWatch.com. Dave, an auto body repair technician, had the idea that people would want to watch their car progress through body repair over the Web. If you've ever had a fender bender and experienced the seemingly random process of what it takes to get your crumpled fender fixed, you can probably sympathize.
In 2001, when Dave started devoting his full time to AutoWatch, posting pictures on the Web was not terribly novel. What was novel was Dave's realization that with the right mix of services targeted at the right people, he could make a market of it that would support a business.
Dave first sold to independent body shops before being championed by insurers, allowing him to increase his installations by hundreds per year. Now, he's using the financial success of this first business to extend the concept to other aspects of car repair and home construction.
Second, the story of innovation in Michigan is not bounded by Michigan's state borders. Perhaps the best example of this is Lou Rosenfeld, who spent 20 years of his career in Michigan, creating the field of information architecture with his partner Peter Morville, before moving back to Brooklyn, N.Y. to be nearer his aging parents.
Lou authored three books and founded two companies in Ann Arbor, all with the express purpose of improving information flow on the World Wide Web. His market was always national and even global, though his number of employees never exceeded 100. The same can be said for many other site participants still in Michigan - many in the Ann Arbor area - like Pure Visibility, Menlo Innovations, Online Technologies, Logic Solutions, RAMSoft, PI Engineering, Adaptive Materials, PowerPass and Inner Circle Media.
These innovators' ability to compete globally has been a bright spot in Michigan's economy amidst the decline in manufacturing employment. In essence, they are finding paths for Michigan to grow in the global economy, and if anything, more such pathfinders are needed.
Which leads me to my last point. Founding Michigan Innovators was not just about soothing late-night jitters over the state's economic outlook. Over at Eastern Michigan University, Diana Wong and I are using the site as a research archive and teaching tool for different forms of leadership and innovation. This summer, some external collaborators and I plan to expand the scope of Michigan Innovators' educational efforts. We also want to enhance the site's value as a connection point for the local business community.
We want to help put Michigan back on the path to growth by telling its innovation story.
(n.b. This article originally appeared in The Ann Arbor News)