The heroes of America have always been the start-ups, the innovators, job creators, entrepreneurs and the risk takers, those who believe in an idea and run with it against all odds and succeed by sheer will. It’s a narrative upon which this nation was founded and that has grown mythical proportions. It may have reached its most fevered climactic expression in Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," still the favorite story of Republican presidential contenders. But it gets new juice from a totally different angle: Figures we call techies, hackers, and disrupters are in many respects a re-incarnation of this American hero, and once again high hopes are pinned to their success.
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Top five States by employment in IT industries |
The intensity and power of the innovator-as-hero energy was on display last week when the "creative class" took a couple of hours out of their busy schedules to celebrate a godfather of IT disruption who came to Baltimore on the occasion of
Innovation Week. The locus of the event was ironic, but also intentional: the Museum of Industry, a place where Baltimore's past innovation heroes and their inventions, from passenger rail to bottle caps, each have their shrines.
A high intensity hum filled the space in part caused by eager networking and in part by the expectation to see innovation veteran Steve Case, who hadn't arrived yet because his was still hopping from one Baltimore start-up to the next (see BBJ
blog). Case is the man who co-founded AOL, a company now almost as quaint as Bell Labs or the B&O Railroad. Steve Case was in town as part of his bus trip across America, intended to bring attention to "the rest" through a tour dubbed "
Rise of the Rest." Not a very flattering designation for the cities along his route. Case's stated purpose: to distribute venture capital from going at a rate of 75% to only three states (California, Massachusetts and New York) to going "anywhere and everywhere". To show that he means business, he....
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