Minnesota entrepreneurship: From beer to replaceable lawnmower blades

It's in vogue to praise entrepreneurship as the engine that can expand Minnesota's economy.

Fading is the instinct for communities to build industrial parks and chase the smokestack, the out-of-town employer who can roll in and hire 200 people. You can hear the crescendo for "growing your own," helping small operations and the self-employed.

But how do you do that? For the past couple of months we've been reporting on the contours of that effort as our latest Ground Level project. And today we're starting to publish and broadcast the results. Check out our new One Job at a Time page.

Minnesotans provide an unending stream of entrepreneurial ideas, from a sunflower-seed snack inspired by a peanut allergy to a heavy pipe-handling machine that sprang to someone's mind after an oilfield injury in Texas; from a brewery financed by community members willing to kick in a few bucks to the Gillette-razor-like notion of selling lawnmower blades that can be replaced.

Breweries, in fact, seem to be capturing a lot of entrepreneurial spirit, including that of Scott Kolby and William Norman in Red Wing:

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But when you look at the numbers, gains in entrepreneurship are hard to spot in the past couple years. There have been a few signs lately that things are picking up and lots of people around the state are trying to encourage that.

In Little Falls, Red Wing, Mankato and elsewhere, incubators, both real world and virtual, are helping entrepreneurs launch themselves. Foundations are increasing the number and amount of microloans they issue to startups -- the two most active are in opposite corners of Minnesota. Communities like Worthington are trying to tap the education and business expertise in their areas to create niches. Other efforts focus on specific groups of would be entrepreneurs, like Latinos.

We'll be adding to this web page in coming days, and we'll be on the air today through the middle of next week with a series of special reports. It's good stuff on two levels -- the bright ideas springing from the minds of Minnesotans are compellikng in their own right and, perhaps more important, maybe some communities are gradually figuring out how to foster a new economic culture.

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