Calling Cleveland a “Fast City,” the business mag touts BioEnterprises’s “forced collaboration,” bringing in 100 companies, $1 billion in new funding and 20,000 related biomedical jobs.
From Fast Company:
“We were staring into the abyss,” says Baiju Shah, CEO of BioEnterprise, recalling the 2000 recession that had slowed Cleveland’s economy to a crawl. “It wasn’t just a cyclical thing; there were global forces at work that were going to leave us behind for good.” As the city bled jobs in traditional sectors, such as manufacturing, committed competitors — including Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, Case Western Reserve University, and Summa Health System — banded together to save the city and themselves. In 2002, they launched BioEnterprise, a unique accelerator that provides health-care startups with access to biomedical-specific expertise, world-class research, and cold, hard investment cash. “It’s a true collaboration,” Shah says. “Either the chair or CEO of each partner institution has been actively involved.” Shah, a Cleveland native, studied similar biomedical clusters in other cities, looking for best practices. The big insight? Follow the money. “We ask what investors want to invest in and then we go find it,” he says. Bill Sanford, a cofounder and original chair, agrees: “This was not a social-service thing. We were going to take a venture-capital approach to bioscience-related economic development — real companies with business plans and an identified path to success…”
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