In recent years, Illinois has taken strides to establish itself as a global destination for talent, innovation and technology. While Chicago is now frequently thought of in the same vein as New York and San Francisco when it comes to attracting top companies, the city and Illinois are lagging far behind in a key indicator — entrepreneurship.
To generate rapid, sustainable economic recovery from the pandemic and restore faith in the promise of the American Dream, we must return our focus to the American entrepreneur. Encouraging entrepreneurship creates jobs and stimulates our local economies; it’s what our country was built on.
But meeting the demands of a successful entrepreneurial pursuit requires a lot today. Gone are the days when financial incentives alone were enough to encourage firms to relocate or expand. Instead, if you want to be a successful economic developer, mayor or governor, you need to build thriving clusters and ecosystems of young, entrepreneurial firms and the talented founders creating them.
That’s why Heartland Forward, a think tank of which I am president and CEO, developed the America’s Entrepreneurial States, a new tool and index to evaluate which states have the most conducive environments for promoting entrepreneurship.
Our approach is based on the factors underpinning the spark that ignites entrepreneurship in a region. Entrepreneurs are the core of an entrepreneurial ecosystem, supported by factors such as talent, knowledge creation, financial resources, support services, quality of place and the social capital binding them together.
California is first and New York is second, but what is shocking is that Illinois is rankedNo. 20. States such as Utah, Nevada, Alaska, Vermont and Idaho all ranked higher than Illinois on our index.
So where does Illinois go from here? To nurture vibrant young firms, we need public and private investment in entrepreneurial support organizations. That’s why Heartland Forward is working with Builders and Backers to bring its Community Growth Program and Toolkit to the heartland to boost social entrepreneurship and potential scalable businesses.
By investing in motivated, community-driven people who have ideas they want to test to make a change, we can encourage local development, angel and crowd platforms, and venture capital investors to provide startup capital.
It also means working with Illinois’ many top universities to increase a focus on entrepreneurship and commercializing their innovations, but also not ignoring the fact that we need to be starting earlier. Our K-12 education system needs to expose students to entrepreneurial thinking and training. This should be a foundational and intentional focus of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
None of this can be accomplished without boosting high-speed internet, access and affordability and computer literacy. Gov. J.B. Pritzker knows this and has made it a top priority here in Illinois, and through our Connecting the Heartland initiative, we are continuing to advocate for funding and policy changes at the local, state and federal levels to promote greater affordability, accessibility and adoptability of high-speed internet.
Illinois has the ingredients to be a global hub for entrepreneurship, but right now it’s just not living up to its potential. Investing in community-driven entrepreneurship programs and educational pipelines can set the state on a pathway to success.
Ross DeVol is president and CEO of Heartland Forward.
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