RedPost

I’m sitting at the airport on my way back from Texas to the great white north. So I figured I’d get a blog post in. The following is an op-ed piece I submitted to the local papers as well as some larger nationals. It’s based on this blog post. While the Washington Post refused it but sent me a personal note, The South Bend Tribune and Elkhart Truth both published it. Neither have it available freely online (the SB Trib is subscription-based…crazy). So here it is, free and publicly available. I’ve been waiting to post it until it ran in the papers:

Mr. Obama: When you visit, look for the seeds of the recovery – they’re already here

Two events converged this weekend: the jobless rate for Elkhart County became the worst in the nation, spurring our new President to visit, and my company completed a patent study of Indiana, focused on the North Central region to which Elkhart belongs. While these two events may seem unrelated, they fit together nicely for me. Yes, the economy is tanking. Sales of recreational vehicles, the linchpin of this county’s economy, are scant. But opportunity and the seeds of our recovery are all around us.

First, some background. North Central Indiana is one of the few remaining manufacturing hot spots in the U.S and up until this past year has been churning away with sub 5% unemployment for years. Within ten miles of my start-up software company’s headquarters, manufacturers churn out everything from those metal carts you haul wood around at Lowe’s to U.S. Postal Service and UPS trucks to propane tanks to mobile homes and RVs to plastic garbage bags.

Our county in particular has gone through several major industry changes, from the invention of Alka-Seltzer and the rise of Miles Laboratories (now Bayer) and simultaneous rise of Charles Conn and the band instrument industry in the 1800s to 14 automobile manufacturers in the early 1900s to the creation of the RV industry after the Great Depression and the present-day diversified manufacturing base.

At Elkhart County’s core is innovation. Despite common misperception, innovation is not a product; it’s not genomics or nanotechnology or rocket science. It’s a process, pure and simple, equal parts gumption, entrepreneurship and novelty with a sprinkling of occasional stupidity.

You can innovate manufacturing a garbage bag, as the local company Rollpak did 30 years ago, as much as you can innovate manufacturing a prosthetic limb, as Kosciusko County, the undisputed prosthetics capital of the world, does to our south.

So let’s look at the some data from the study we just completed, built on a database of 51,882 patents either invented in Indiana or owned by Indiana companies (you can view the full study at patents.michianatech.org). Here are the top 10 per capita patent producing counties in Indiana (throwing out the tiny counties with less than 50,000 people):

1. Kosciusko (prosthetics capital)
2. Bartholomew (Columbus)
3. Howard (Kokomo)
4. Elkhart (that’s us)
5. Hamilton (Indianapolis)
6. Marion (Indianapolis)
7. Tippecanoe (Purdue)
8. Allen (Ft. Wayne)
9. Vanderburgh (Evansville)
10. St. Joseph (South Bend)

Notice that Elkhart County is fourth, producing more patents per capita than the research powerhouse that is Purdue University and the booming big pharma hub (think Eli Lilly) that is Indianapolis.

So where are these seeds of recovery?

Here in Elkhart County, innovation and entrepreneurship (arguably the same process) are embedded in how we think. That’s not to say that certain industries, when they’re making big margins on heavy, environmentally-unfriendly RVs, don’t ride on past innovation, stopping or slowing the process — that’s just human nature. But especially in bad times, innovation is something we rely on here; it’s part of our culture.

Case in point: my start-up, RedPost inc., shares office space with another startup, Lucid Energy.

RedPost is a web software company working to lower the barrier to entry to the digital sign market. Part of how we’re lowering costs on hardware is by combining local manufacturing and prototyping expertise with electronics imported from Taiwan – the best of both worlds. This allows us to charge less for hardware and open up new, untapped markets to our industry.

Lucid Energy is an alternative energy offshoot of an RV supplier that grew by building better ramps and doors for the RV industry. Lucid Energy engineers and manufactures wind and water turbines based on a patented, helical design that improves efficiency.

Both our companies have been around for roughly two years and have great potential. Both are located here in Elkhart County and leverage local manufacturing expertise to compete in booming industries. Both have innovation at the core of their being.

So don’t worry about Elkhart County too much (but we’ll certainly take some stimulus monies). We know how to take risks, make new things and make things better. Which isn’t to say that managing cashflow or raising capital is easy. But whichever companies do survive the downturn will drive our country’s recovery, building on the value inherent to their core innovations. Those that don’t survive will have refused to change as the world changed around them.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 21st, 2009 @ 4:30 pm on the category Community, Elkhart County, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.