Create the supply chain with innovation, suggests business researcher
"It makes a difference whether you're part of a supply chain instead of creating the supply chain," suggested Williams during a dinner previewing the 12th annual 50 Most Important African-Americans in Technology.
Several companies from the Catapult Innovation Showcase, an initiative to identify the most promising cutting edge firms with potential to create large numbers of jobs, shared their products and strategies with Williams and Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame member Roy Clay Sr., chair of Rod-L Electronics Inc.
Williams is also Executive Director/CEO of Kauffman's UEP, which has a detailed strategy for coaching minority entrepreneurs which has increased sales and profitability. UEP target markets include Detroit and New Orleans. In Detroit, UEP is helping long-time auto industry suppliers find new markets for their manufacturing expertise.
"If you rely on one customer and that customer has a bad year, you have a bad year," noted the sociologist.
A Piece of the Pie: State of Black Business, 8th edition, described findings of a 12-city tour to identify African-American manufacturing companies which can provide innovative globally competitive products like Clay's Rod-L electronic test equipment. Each year, 1,000 African-Americans gain patents.
Boston Consulting Group expert James Lowry, in a new book Minority Business Success, has also called for a economic development instead of a compliance approach to growing minority companies.
Carl Kent, CEO of MyMediaTones, and Charlene Coleman, CEO of Sensory Acumen Inc., showed Williams how they are parlaying intellectual property into building whole new industries.
Kent displayed a disruptive mobile couponing application, FriendCoup, already downloaded to thousands of iPhones, and Coleman described her GameSkunk offactory device is being used to provide smells for games and finding unanticipated uses for medical treatment, particularly for war veterans facing post-traumatic stress disorder.
Another expert at the dinner, Scott Taper, managing director of SciTech Commercialization and Licensing, described how the city of Sunnyvale transitioned from semiconductors by targeting biotechnology companies. The comprehensive strategy integrated classroom education from kindergarten through college, workforce training, facilities and capital. Amarantus BioSciences, another Catapult company, is growing its business in an incubator created by that strategy.
Roy Clay, the chair of Rod-L Electronics, also joined the discussion. Clay came into technology in 1956, five years after an aircraft maker in St. Louis told him there were "no jobs for professional Negroes." Within a decade, he was manager of computer research and development for Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto.
One of his discoveries was the first fault-tolerant computer, with redundancies for full-time operation. When his boss at HP declined to move forward, Clay's product was embraced as the first big deal by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.
Clay said it was the first big IPO in Silicon Valley, a financing process which revolutionized the growth of technology companies. "The thing that made Silicon Valley great was capital," said Clay.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Clay sought to create employment magnets for the new city of East Palo Alto, first with a light industrial parts supplier for technology firms.
In 1977, he came to the same conclusion as Williams by inventing the hi pot tester and marketing it to all the major electronics manufacturers. Rod-L Electronics continues to make its machines in Silicon Valley, using workers recruited from organizations such as OIC-West.
That multiple bottom-line proposition of innovation and job creation is a reason for a policy focus on bringing manufacturing jobs back into African-American communities, now facing record high unemployment.
Innovation & Equity 2012, on Jan. 15 in the nation's capital, will follow up on last year's theme Spurring Manufacturing Through Innovation in Black Communities by spotlighting companies discovered around the country during the series of Catapult events.
50 Most selectees in attendance will represent hundreds of patents. The collaboration will also include top practitioners in intellectual property including some of the key figures in development of the America Invents Act, signed today by President Obama.
