Commerce Department Names Members of National Innovation Council
Posted by David Bruggeman on July 14, 2010
Ten months after announcing the formation of the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Commerce Secretary Locke has named the members of the Council. The announcement was made at a University Innovation Forum held at the University of Michigan this week. The university’s President, Mary Sue Coleman, is one of the Council’s Co-Chairs. The other two are Desh Deshpande, an engineer and serial entrepreneur, and Steve Case, one of the co-founders of AOL.
While we know the members of the Council, there’s no mention of when the first meeting will be, or any significant web presence for either the Council or the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship that will support it. That office is supposedly part of the Economic Development Administration (EDA), but I see no evidence of that from the EDA website. The same lack of information surrounded the Department’s February event on university innovation, and the other forums held similar to the University of Michigan event. Exactly why meetings on university innovation are kept so close to the vest continues to befuddle me. I can think of no good reason why these events are treated like closed meetings, and I’m afraid the Council will take a similar turn in its meetings.
A full list of Council members after the jump. They are a mix of business, university and foundation people, with some variety of businesses represented.
| Tom | Alberg | Managing Director, Madrona Venture Group |
| Tom | Baruch | Founder and Managing Director, CMEA Capital |
| Claude | Canizares | Vice President for Research and Associate Provost, Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Curtis | Carlson | President & CEO, SRI International |
| Steve | Case | Chairman & CEO, Revolution; Co-Founder, AOL |
| Robin | Chase | Co-Founder, Zipcar |
| Marcelo | Claure | Founder, Chairman, President & CEO, Brightstar |
| Mary Sue | Coleman | President, University of Michigan |
| Michael | Crow | President, Arizona State University |
| Desh | Deshpande | Chairman, A123 Systems, Sycamore Networks, Tejas Networks, and Sparta Group |
| Judith | Estrin | Co-Founder, Bridge, NCD, Precept, Packet Design; Former CTO, Cisco Systems |
| Ping | Fu | Co-Founder, Chairman, President & CEO, Geomagic |
| Christina | Gabriel | Director, Innovation Economy, The Heinz Endowments |
| Barron | Harvey | Dean, Howard University School of Business |
| Krisztina | Holly | Vice Provost for Innovation, University of Southern California; Executive Director, USC Stevens Institute for Innovation |
| Ray | Leach | CEO, JumpStart |
| Kenneth | Morse | Co-Founder, 3Com and Aspen Technology; Founding Managing Director, MIT Entrepreneurship Center |
| G.P. “Bud” | Peterson | President, Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Michael | Roberts | Founder & CEO, The Roberts Companies |
| RoseAnn | Rosenthal | CEO, Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania |
| Carl | Schramm | President & CEO, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation |
| Ellen | Siminoff | CEO, Shmoop; Founding Executive, Yahoo! |
| Holden | Thorp | Chancellor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| Charles | Vest | President, National Academy of Engineering; former President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Jeffrey | Wadsworth | President & CEO, Battelle |
| Jerry | Yang | Co-Founder and Chief Yahoo, Yahoo! |
burton dorion said
I am concerned that Ray Leach has made his way to advise this group on entrepreneurship and innovation. If you do a fact check on Ray’s claims that he is a serial entreprenuer, you will see that he has never founded anything private startup of any magnitude (job creation, wealth creation for investors/employees, or revenue).
Ray is the CEO of Jumpstart which is a government funded “non profit” which was formed to invest in and advise early stage companies/startups. Jumpstart is a great example of failures in government trying to create startups. Jumpstart has burned through $60m since it’s founding and has very little to show for it. Out of the $60m only $16m has actually been invested in companies. The rest has gone to pay their high salaries and overhead. ($8m out of their $11m budget goes to fund overhead and salaries. Don’t worry, it is gov money).
Ray just gave himself a $30k raise to bring his total comp to $428k and the top ten people bring in over $2.3m.
Despite these high salaries and enormous head count and overhead, there isn’t hardly anyone on the staff with any startup success. After investing in close to 50 companies since 2004, there are few positive results and the RIO on the state money has been non existent.
There are groups like Jumsptart all over the country. They have produces results 10x that Jumpstart has on 10% of their budget. The reason you don’t hear about them is they use their budgets wisely and don’t have a 5 person marketing staff (Almost every other group like Jumpstart doesn’t have 1 marketing person as they don’t sell anything).
When Jumpstart was formed in 2004, its goal was that positive returns on their investments would make them self suffecient. This hasn’t happened as they haven’t had one positive exit after close to 50 comanies.
No private fund in the world would accept no returns after 6 years and $60 burned though and they would never tolerate that 75% of the fund went to fund overhead vs. 25% of the funds invested in companies.
If you do your research, you will realize that Jumpstart is a huge failure for the tax payers of Ohio. I am not against using gov money for economic development however, in Ohio, it isn’t getting to the companies that need it, it is tied up in the many groups who admin the money while paying themselves salaries. Despite the fact that Jumpstart has 35 employees where the vast majority are making tremendously more than they have ever made in the private sector, almost no who works there has had any success founding a startup.
I don’t mind that Ohio spends so much toward spurring startups, I mind that it is wasted. I hope the true and proven entreprenuers’ voices on this panel drownd out Ray’s.
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