Entrepreneurship is nothing new in the Greater Lansing region—it dates back at least as far as Lansing’s Ransom Eli Olds, who became the first person to mass produce automobiles when his curved dash Oldsmobile rolled off the assembly line in 1901.

For our region to grow and prosper into the future, we need to renew that spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation. In Greater Lansing Next: A Plan for Regional Prosperity (www.greaterlansingnext.com), a regional plan for strategic growth, we identified key things we need to do to expand the scope, coverage and impact of existing entrepreneurship and innovation initiatives here and create new ones.

It won’t be easy, but here’s the good news: We’re not starting from scratch. The Greater Lansing region already has a lot to offer to the entrepreneurs among us.

In October 2009, Entrepreneur magazine included East Lansing in its listing of the Best College Towns to Start a Business. The magazine credited Michigan State University’s efforts to create and incubate businesses through the MSU Product Center for Agriculture and Natural Resources (which commercializes new food manufacturers), MSU Technologies (its tech transfer office) and MSU Business Connect (which links businesses in the community to university resources).

Entrepreneur also gave nods to Leap and to Prima Civitas Foundation, as well as to the City of East Lansing for its Technology Innovation Center (TIC).

In November, Eaton Rapids opened a small business incubator of its own—the Center for Incubation and Education. In December, Entrepreneur returned to our region to help East Lansing celebrate the first birthday of the TIC and acknowledge its first graduate—Enliven Software, which outgrew its space there and moved into an adjacent office. CEO Bunmi Akinyemij, who launched Enliven in 2007, now employs 10 people.

That’s just a start.

Today, DeWitt High School students and teachers are working to raise money to open the DeWitt Arts and Technology Center, which will include space for high school students and recent graduates to start their businesses. East Lansing is gearing up to open The Hatch, a student business accelerator that will be located next to the TIC, and is considering a restaurant incubator in another location. Lansing city officials are scouting locations for a high-tech incubator.

And that’s not all.

Leap’s recent Next Bright Idea competition offered students enrolled in any higher education institution in the region a platform to share their ideas and the opportunity to win the resources to implement them. Nearly 40 students submitted ideas that ranged from a portable shower to a residential green roof system to a nonprofit that would permit people to round their purchases up to the nearest dollar and donate the difference to charity.

Greater Lansing region residents voted for the competition’s 10 finalists, who presented their ideas in front of a panel of judges and an audience of local leaders, businesspeople and students in February. The winner received $5,000 to further develop his or her idea, along with a Dale Carnegie Training® scholarship, access to Leap’s business development staff and SpringBoard program, and 90 days’ free lease at East Lansing’s TIC.

In addition, The Greater Lansing Business Monthly presented the 16th annual Entrepreneurial Awards of Greater Lansing last month, adding to the more than 130 local business owners and managers who have been recognized since the inception of the awards in 1994.

Past winners include Bob Fish, who has grown BIGGBY COFFEE from a single location in 1995 into a franchise with more than 100 stores in six states and 2008 sales of $38.5 million; Bill Hamilton, who now employs more than 100 people at TechSmith Corporation; Matthew Hill, who now employs more than 150 people at Liquid Web; and Mary Ellen Sheets, who has turned her sons’ high school business—known as Two Men and a Truck®/INTERNATIONAL, Inc.—into the nation’s largest franchised local moving company.

If there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s that the Greater Lansing region is filled with people who are filled with ideas—ideas that have the potential to transform our region for the better and help us build a more prosperous future.

We need to encourage them.

We need to support them.

We need them.

		Denyse Ferguson is the president and CEO of the Lansing Economic Area Partnership (Leap, Inc.), the region’s leading economic development organization.