Spurring sustained entrepreneurial growth and high-technology innovation is the holy grail of every economic-development plan. But while vibrant clusters of start-ups have sprouted serendipitously in places like Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128, governments acting alone have been unsuccessful in building them from the ground up.
Today new approaches are being tried to draw potential business innovators out of their universities, hospitals, and research institutes and thus to ignite the engine of wealth creation. One approach relies on the leadership of local business in partnership with government.1 A different approach uses business plan competitions—either alone or in a broader economic-development effort—as the catalyst for growth.
Business plan competitions coax the future’s Bill Gateses and Andrew Groveses into the open
Inspired by student-run competitions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, McKinsey is working with regional governments in Europe and the United States and with private-sector entities—business associations, service providers, universities, research institutes, and companies—to sponsor business plan competitions to help individual start-ups get off the ground. Such competitions coax into the open not only the Bill Gateses and Andrew Groveses of the future but also the all-important networks of advisers and financiers on whom they depend.
Promising early results...