Q&A with Rosabeth Moss Kanter | Harvard Magazine Sep-Oct 2012 - 0 views
harvardmagazine.com/...the-business-ecosystem
business ecosystem harvard Moss_Kanter womenslearningstudio
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Ecosystem” conveys the idea that all the pieces of an economy come together in particular places, and that their strength and interactions determine prosperity and economic growth.
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Think of it as your garden, where you need fertile soil, seeds, and other ingredients to make things grow.
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Four issues strike me as key: turning ideas into enterprises; linking small and large businesses; better connecting education to jobs; and encouraging cross-sector collaboration.
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There is evidence that if you make the connections between knowledge creators and businesses tighter, you can increase success. Compared to stand-alone business incubators, university-based incubators tend to keep more people in the community to start their enterprises and tend to have higher success rates, because they are able to connect small enterprises with mentors. Small business needs capital but it also really needs expertise—so Harvard’s new Innovation Lab is a fantastic thing.
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We should have a national call to action with commitments from big companies to mentor and connect with smaller enterprises.
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they ran with it and created Supplier Connection—a universal vendor application, kind of like the common college application. They announce opportunities through Supplier Connection to thousands of small businesses.
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community colleges haven’t been well connected to employers—and their graduation rates have been incredibly poor.
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There are growing consortiums where leaders of organized labor, community colleges, high schools, businesses, and representatives of the elected officials sit down together to talk about skills needs and who’s going to help deal with them. The two-year colleges in Spartanburg and Greenville were the secret to that manufacturing center. South Carolina is still not the most prosperous state, but it would have been Appalachian poor if not for Governor Dick Riley (later U.S. secretary of education) focusing on the community colleges in collaboration with the industrialists.
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the evidence is that you get better outcomes in terms of people finishing their two-year programs and getting jobs when there’s a closer tie to employers.
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community leadership and collaboration across sectors. Even if we suddenly had a national program throwing money at community colleges, you still need community leaders talking to each other—where people agree on certain priorities, align their interests, align what they do behind those priorities.