No good entrepreneurs in Cleveland

I got angry yesterday morning.

It’s not an emotion I like to experience before breakfast, but a Plain Dealer story I read left me little choice. It reported that movers and shakers in Cleveland’s business-development community believe our region lacks seasoned entrepreneurs and that the best strategy our leading development fund could adopt would be to import talent from Boston, Silicon Valley and select places overseas.

Excuse me? A shortage of talent and experience?

This is the bitterest joke that Cleveland endlessly plays on itself – claiming that people here aren’t good enough to invest in when the real problem is that the talented, enterprising ones are routinely ignored by the very leaders and groups that could help them and the local economy the most.

“Believe in Cleveland”? Great promotional slogan for a city whose ”developers” don’t do anything of the sort. What they do is look around with their noses in the air, see nothing that’s happening on the ground and conclude that we need to uproot the brilliant thinkers and doers from some other city and embed them in our half-empty office towers and decaying factories. 

There are imaginative and capable people all over this corner of Ohio who are starting from scratch with great ideas that could become important sources of jobs, money, community pride and, someday, global influence – but because they don’t fall into the one narrow category of worthy enterprises (IT innovations or biotech that will produce $1 billion in revenue in five years) local major funders will consider, they are denied the money they need to succeed. 

Compare this reality to what’s happened in Ireland, a long-impoverished nation that has undergone an absolute economic revolution in the last few years. What did the Irish do right?

 As the New York Times reported nearly a year ago:

“The change began when Ireland entered the European Union in 1973. In subsequent years, the government rewrote its tax policies to attract foreign investment by American corporations, made all education free through the university level and changed tax rates and used direct equity investment to encourage Irish people to set up their own businesses.

‘The change came in the 1990s,’ said James Murphy, founder and managing director of Lifes2Good, a marketer of drugstore products for muscle aches, hair loss and other maladies. ‘Taxes and interest rates came down, and all of a sudden we believed in ourselves.’ ”

Think of that. Ireland encouraged its own people – not people from someplace else - to set up their own businesses. National leaders trusted that Ireland actually had talented entrepreneurs just waiting to be given a chance and encouraged them with material help. They believed in themselves. And – what do you know! – a lot of entrepreneurs emerged and are succeeding fantastically, building their ideas and small companies into international corporations that are bringing gobs of money, excitement, pride and an improving standard of living to a land once synonymous with hopeless destitution. 

Now, get this: Right underneath the story I read about Cleveland business development was another one noting that the Ohio state government had approved grants to three business projects expected to bring jobs to Cuyahoga and Summit counties, the home bases of Cleveland and Akron, respectively.

What is one of the three? A $78,000 grant to buy equipment for Proxy Biomedical Limited, an Irish company specializing in bio-materials, as part of a $2 million project expected to create 26 jobs.

So Ireland believes in the Irish and so does Ohio. But no one in charge believes in entrepreneurial Clevelanders. 

No wonder our most gifted citizens so often decide, after years of fruitless efforts, to “be leavin’ Cleveland.”