Industry Week has a blurb about a new partnership between Ford and TechShop.

TechShop is a membership-based workshop (originally in the San Francisco area) which provides access to specialized (read: Highly expensive) tools to inventors and do-it-yourself-ers like CNC machines, lathes, and precision plasma cutters.  TechShop is opening a facility in the Detroit area focused on automotive industry innovation.  The Big Blue Oval is signing on as a sponsor of a new location in Michigan– with the obvious benefit that it will have access (and cache) with inventors pushing the “bleeding edge” of development.  Ford has shown a recent ability to adapt and innovate, and this partnership seems to follow the storyline that the company is open to new ideas, and to taking input from external sources.

While TechShop is itself an interesting example of a business finding an un-filled niche, this is also a really interesting use of “crowdsourcing,” and holds great potential for growing local businesses in an area suffering from near-catastrophic decline.

Last November, The Kauffman Foundation issued a great report entitled “Where Will the Jobs Come From.”  In a novel approach to reviewing job creation data, the researchers (Dane Stangler and Robert Litan) examined the data looking for firm age, rather than size, and emphasized job creation rather than current employment.  In their words: “Let’s not ask where people work, but where each additional increment in net job creation occurs” (pg 4).  They’re using Census Bureau data, so of course, there is some latency in the information.  The study’s research data focused on 2007.  Several interesting points worth noting:

“…without startups, net job creation for the American economy would be negative in all but a handful of years.”  (pg 5)

Given that roughly half of start-up companies fail, the authors posit that some number of those gains are included in subsequent years’ losses.  But they’re more interested in the 50% of start-up companies that survive from year 1 to year 5:

“[in 2007] young companies, those aged one to five, had been the most dynamic in adding new jobs to the economy.  OF the entire pool of new jobs added in 2007, about two-thirds was generated by these young companies.” (pg 6).

So what?  The authors put their most important point in large-font, bold type, so I will too:

ENTREPRENEURS = RECOVERY