Financial Post excerpt (13 Oct 2015)
The World Bank has an unsettling message for young people around the globe: Whether you’re male or female, live in Tunisia or the U.S., you will struggle to find a job. Across regions and continents, people 15 to 29 years old are at least twice as likely as adults to be unemployed. The world will have to create 600 million jobs over the next 10 years, or
5 million a month, just to prevent the situation from getting worse, the Washington-based lender said in a report it released Tuesday with coalition partners such as the International Labor Organization.
5 million a month, just to prevent the situation from getting worse, the Washington-based lender said in a report it released Tuesday with coalition partners such as the International Labor Organization.
Jobs come from small business, big companies and government. We can still remember when jobs were created by large companies who hired lifetime employees. When that model was disrupted by cheaper global labour, small (knowledge-based) businesses multiplied, filling the gap. Since the 2008 recession, the main job creation driver has been in the form of business incubators and accelerator groups created by Universities such as Waterloo's Velocity Garage, by fortune 500 companies, such as IBM's Bluemix Garage and by trust foundations such as D and AD which foster and create startups. We are actively pursuing the development of a startup accelerator in Iskandar, Malaysia, with a cooperative link to the Toronto startup ecosystem in an effort to nurture innovation and to create jobs and build economies.
Our goal is to participate in the creation of 1,000,000 jobs across the globe.
Our goal is to participate in the creation of 1,000,000 jobs across the globe.
From the World Global Startup Ecosystem Ranking report: "But beyond wealth, startups also bring jobs. Lots of jobs. In fact, they're the only ones who bring new net job growth. The highly influential Kauffman Study demonstrated that over the past 28 years, startups were responsible for all net new job creation in the U.S. On average over that period, Industrial era companies shed more jobs than they created, while startups added to the total. Moreover, this stunning finding held up even when looking at individual years. In 21 out of 28 years (75%), startups were the only net job creators...Together, these circumstances make for a very simple equation: in the coming decades, the ecosystems with the most thriving startups will enjoy the most thriving economies."
From Tech.Co: “The need to spread and build a culture of entrepreneurship among the youth in the country is critical to reap the demographic dividend of India,” says Vijayakumar. “With over 225 million youth in the 19 to 25 age groups, the country needs to create a million jobs a month for the next 20 years to employ all its youth. This huge number of jobs is not going to come from established companies; it will come from startups and this is where efforts to create ecosystems like Startup Village become significant in nation-building.”
From the World Global Startup Ecosystem Ranking report: "The Silicon Valley Competitiveness and innovation Project's report on Silicon Valley shows that each high-tech worker in its ecosystem helped to generate roughly five jobs in the service sector, ranging from physicians and teachers to restaurant workers and landscapers. In its impact study, Facebook itself claims to have created 4 million jobs globally, including app developers and Facebook marketers."
|
As the Working Class shrank, the Creative Class expanded. Between 2001 and 2010, the Creative Class grew by 2.8 million workers, or 7.2%, expanding from 38.7 million to 41.4 million members. The working class loss some 6 million of its members- nearly one in 5 workers- over this same period... Cities with a larger creative class experienced slower unemployment as the crisis started, and the rate was even slower as joblessness was expanding across the country…Cities with a creative workforce reached a lower peak unemployment rate and then recovered more quickly.(Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, Pg 51)
|
|
|
Less than 1% of new businesses started each year in the US receive venture funding, and total VC investments account for less than 0.2% of GDP. But the results of those investments disproportionately propel the entire economy. Venture backed companies create 11% of all private sector jobs. (Peter Thiel, Zero to One, pg 89)
|
|
|
We are reacting to the latest phenomenon in job creation today which provides a unique business opportunity. VC Mark Suster noted at the PreMoney Miami TechCrunch conference that conditions today are all working towards enabling successful companies (companies that have a good product and have actual customers) to grow faster than ever. “There are 50 times more Internet users today (33% of the worlds population) than in 1995, Internet speeds are 180 times faster, and people rely largely on their mobile devices – all of these, plus many more factors contribute to an ecosystem enabling rapid growth”. With 1 billion digital shoppers worldwide and USD $1.5 trillion global ecommerce spend, our accelerator and lab program will be orchestrated to take advantage of and to monetise this opportunity.
|
|
|
500 Startups founding partner Dave McClure (Gospel of Lean) notes that the vast amount of people online today (about 3 billion) allows startups to build a product and to get it to market today with less capital than ever before. He has proven that an accelerator can find great success on maximizing the amount of smaller investments; his portfolio after 5 years numbers about 600 companies.
Ideal City plans to emulate this strategy. |
|
From Tesla, Inventor of the Electrical Age …we need to recall Schumpeter’s idea that economies grow as a result of two kinds of innovation. On one hand there are the creative responses of entrepreneurs and inventors who introduce new products, processes and services and in doing so dramatically change everyday life and reorder the industrial world; as Clayton Christensen has suggested, these can be called disruptive innovations. On the other hand there are the adaptive responses of managers and engineers who undertake the steady and incremental work of establishing the corporate structures, manufacturing procedures, and marketing plans that allow products and services to be produced and consumed. Clearly the success of any economy depends on getting the right mix of disruptive and adaptive innovations. (pg 401)
Books
Tesla, Inventor of the Electrical Age, Carlson, 2013
Zero to One, Peter Thiel
The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida
Zero to One, Peter Thiel
The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida
Link Image
Hi Tech workers
Header Image
Lunch atop a Skyscraper, 1932
