Universities Can Generate Billions for Regional Economies

Posted by: Mark Marich on February 23, 2009 Source: Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship

Last Tuesday, the Public Forum Institute hosted its first Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship briefing to release the executive summary of a report on the critical role universities play not only in fostering innovation andentrepreneurial growth, but in stimulating the much-needed recovery inregional and global economies.

The full copy of the report, Entrepreneurial Impact: The Role of MIT, is now available from the Kauffman Foundation. The take home message? Work closely with your local universities... it could be worth billions to your regional economy.

If active companies founded by MIT graduates formed an independent nation, their revenues would make that nation at least the seventeenth-largest economy in the world. Globally, a less conservative estimate of their annual world saleswould equal $2 trillion, producing the equivalent of theeleventh-largest economy in the world.

The U.S. states that benefit most from jobs created by MIT alumni?

• Massachusetts (estimated at just under one million jobs worldwide)
• California (estimated at 526,000 jobs)
• New York (estimated at 231,000 jobs)
• Texas (estimated at 184,000)
• Virginia (estimated at 136,000)

Report: 'Entrepreneurial Impact: The Role of MIT' by Edward B. Roberts and Charles Eesley of the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Tags:  mit, kauffman foundation