Businessweek examines entrepreneurship, immigrants and Metro Detroit

Metro Detroit's economy is about to get hit with a trifecta of forces, such as immigrants, opportunity, and entrepreneurship.

Excerpt:

"If we're going to achieve political stability, people have to own the economy." That may be the most cogent statement I've heard about the situation in Iraq. The speaker was Carl Schramm, president of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, explaining on Charlie Rose in late May why U.S. development policy in Iraq and other troubled countries needs to change. (Full disclosure: The Kauffman Foundation has funded and continues to fund some of my research on entrepreneurship.)

What would help these countries most is what many of their citizens want and what the U.S. itself already has: a strong entrepreneurial economy. Merely restoring Iraq's oil industry will not be sufficient. Yes, oil is a tremendous cash cow for the nations that have it. But overreliance on any single industry is risky, as anyone from Detroit can tell you. And a nation that relies too much on the extraction of a single natural resource is courting dictatorship and corruption. It's too easy for a governing junta or a group of oligarchs to control that resource, thereby controlling the population. We've seen this happen in many oil states. Wouldn't it be a shame if all we had accomplished in Iraq was to set the table for the next Saddam?

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Businessweek examines entrepreneurship, immigrants and Metro Detroit

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