This week is New Orleans Entrepreneurship Week (NOEW). Of all of the entrepreneurship conferences and events around the world, I found that NOEW has the most energy and is probably the most fun. It speaks to the opportunity that entrepreneurship gives a city to build upon its strengths, but also to redefine itself for a brighter future.
NOEW is now in its 6th year. It was launched, and is still primarily organized, by the Idea Village, a dynamic non-profit that also manages one of the nation’s best startup accelerator programs. Idea Village and NOEW are probably the best opportunity we have as Americans to watch an entrepreneurial ecosystem grow from the ground up. And the long-term success or failure of the entrepreneurs that pass through Idea Village and NOEW will tell us a lot about our nation’s broad-based ability to support entrepreneurs and scale companies to become job creators – particularly in smaller cities and cities not on the East or West Coast.
This year, NOEW will play host to over 5000 entrepreneurs, businesses executives, prominent investors, and MBA students through over 56 events. These events will include the standard set of speakers, sponsor presentations and startup boot camp events. But it also features two unique events that form the core of the Idea Village model. The first is IdeaCorps and Idea Pitch, hosted in tandem with private equity CEO Jim Coulter. Idea Corps brings management students from the nation’s top business schools, including Harvard, Babson and Stanford, to spend their spring break in New Orleans to directly consult with a startup for the week. This intensive consultation focuses on strategy, business model analysis, research and presentation skills development. On the last day of NOEW, Idea Pitch contestants present to a team of nationally-known judges. Idea Pitch showcases local high growth entrepreneurs to investors like Coulter.
The second major event is the “Big Idea”, held at the famous Manning’s restaurant. This has become the largest physical “crowd funding” event in the world. Nearly 5000 people will attend this year, where they will get a chance to vote on local startups to be awarded over $100,000 in cash and prizes. The event caps off an exciting week of entrepreneurship in the unique way that only New Orleans can host.
I often talk about Idea Village and New Orleans as a national model for entrepreneurship development. Indeed, my impressions have recently been validated by the Brookings Institution, which has reported that startup creation in New Orleans has exceeded the national average by 56% from 2009-2012, and by 33% over fast-growing Southern cities like Houston and Atlanta.
The reason for the growth of entrepreneurship is the broad-based commitment by leaders across New Orleans and Louisiana to build their own economy. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, national commentators often talked about “closing” New Orleans. Instead, local leaders used these tragic events as a wake-up call. They will tell you that they had to focus on entrepreneurship, because nobody else was moving their business to New Orleans. Thus came the spike in entrepreneurship.
But it is not just startups that give this city such entrepreneurial energy. Alongside the tech startups is one of the nation’s most innovative educational experiments. New Orleans boasts one of the largest concentrations of Teach for America and City Year alumni outside New York. These young leaders are remaining here, creating non-profits to serve the city and opening charter schools at a rapid pace. Indeed, these education entrepreneurs, in partnership with the city, have led New Orleans to have over two thirds of their students in charter schools – the highest rate in the nation. The state government has chimed in as well, providing one of the nation’s most generous angel tax credits. This incentivizes wealthy individuals to invest in startup companies and has created a local angel investor network. The New Orleans region is still not a hub of research, with only about $120 million in research funding coming to the area, according to Brookings, but that will change as entrepreneurs become successful and move up-market to more innovation-driven entrepreneurship.
Today, New Orleans is starting to show the signs of a sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem. It now attracts top “names” to NOEW – from companies like
If you are trying to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem from scratch, chances are your experience will be different from New Orleans. Most American cities don’t have the unique culture, food or music. Each city has to find its own, unique character traits that will reflect in its entrepreneurs. But the success of NOEW is not because of that. It is because of the commitment of a very large, and growing group of people to the city and its embrace of their ideas. Some are politicians, some are non-profit leaders and economic planners, and some are educators. And now, nearly 5000 – are entrepreneurial in nature.
(The author has no affiliation with Idea Village or New Orleans Entrepreneurship Week.)
