Press - TiE Ohio

Grass-roots group seeds the future

... more than 350 people gathered at the House of Blues in downtown Cleveland for the official launch of TiE Ohio, a new organization that aims to nurture and accelerate the entrepreneurial activity that Northeast Ohio will need if it is to emerge from this recession primed for success.
That evening's seeds were planted more than a year ago by BioEnterprise CEO Baiju Shah, serial entrepreneur Eddy Zai and others eager to encourage business formation in Greater Cleveland and to link this region more firmly to the global economy. Their discussions led them to TiE, a global mentoring and networking group that was started in 1992 by high-tech immigrant entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The acronym stands for The Indus Entrepreneurs, reflecting the South Asian roots of the founders, but it also has come to represent Talent, Ideas and Enterprise. Cleveland's TiE chapter is the world's 50th.

TiE's organizing concept is pretty simple: Successful entrepreneurs need to give back by offering guidance to the next wave of start-ups. The Ohio TiE group envisions not only helping locally generated ideas go to market, but also working with entrepreneurs affiliated with other chapters who might find this region appealing. The hope is to spur more activity and create a new culture that values innovation and experimentation.

A boost in the entrepreneurial spirit is something Northeast Ohio badly needs: Statistics show that new enterprises here fail no more often than start-ups elsewhere, but that proportionately, this region generates fewer of them. There quite simply needs to be more activity in the pipeline.

If TiE can encourage that -- especially by attracting or energizing immigrants, a major engine of start-ups elsewhere -- it can play an important role in re-establishing this region's economic might.