Students featured in film on Midwestern entrepreneurs

To celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week, the Kauffman Foundation sent two representatives and a camera crew on the road to discover Midwestern entrepreneurs in America’s Heartland. They called their trip the Eship City Tour.

You can see videos from every stop along the tour, like the one above, that features Olin entrepreneurs Markey Culver, MBA’17, and Cole West, BSBA’17; two engineering alumni who launched a business through the Hatchery; and Dedric Carter, WashU’s vice chancellor for operations and technology transfer.

St. Louis was the last stop on on the four-state Midwest road trip last month for Victor Hwang, vice president of entrepreneurship at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and Phil Wickham, executive chairman of the venture program, Kauffman Fellows, and a legendary figure in start-up investing from Silicon Valley. They spent a week driving from Kansas City to Omaha, Cedar Rapids, Peoria and St. Louis to get a close look at the entrepreneurial scene in each city.

“The goal was to talk with real people who are making things happen Kansas City, Omaha, Cedar Rapids, Peoria, and St. Louis,” blogged Hwang before the trip. They wanted to meet key players in each city’s entrepreneurial community — or ecosystems — and learn more about their challenges and what they’re doing to overcome them.

Here’s more from Hwang’s blog post on CNBC.com about the growth of the entrepreneurial movement in the Midwest:

“There is a grassroots movement happening to build these ecosystems of entrepreneurial innovation. The beauty of this movement is that every community in the nation already has the required ingredients — either on their own or in combination with others. Those communities can be small towns or neighborhoods, or even broad cities.”

Innovation ecosystems are traditionally associated with high-tech communities on the East and West coasts — from Silicon Valley to Seattle; Boston to Washington, D.C. But the potential is everywhere. The Midwest is especially well-suited because of its extraordinary natural resources, manufacturing history, engineering talent and expertise, lower cost of living, and the community-minded spirit that is already pervasive.

“The key to strong entrepreneurial ecosystems is not just technology, research institutions, or capital. Instead, it’s the willingness of communities to create their own entrepreneurial cultures by connecting existing ingredients to form environments that spawn businesses in new and unexpected ways. These ecosystems start with local ingredients: talent, history, heritage, and custom, as well as local institutions. But what makes each ecosystem unique is the environment and the way the ingredients are mixed.

“In an ecosystem, the mixing must be organic rather than planned. Ecosystems bring together people with a shared commitment to see what emerges. That’s why diversity is so important, because it enables a combining of skills, backgrounds, experiences and creativity that would not have happened otherwise.”