I was reading this article on Xconomy about their new partnership with the Kauffman Foundation, and the titular question immediately struck me: Why Don’t We Have a Kauffman Foundation?

Think about it: we are a center of innovation, but one of the most difficult places in the country to start and sustain a new business (see Indicator 13). And what do they focus on? Improving the success of entrepreneurship and commercialization!

Of course, the Kauffman Foundation has a national scope, and I’m sure some of our region’s entrepreneurs already benefit from their help and the help of other national programs like the new one announced by Secretary Locke. But there are a couple of good reasons to want to have our own:

1) A lot of our challenges (and opportunities) for start-ups are unique: like the B&O tax, our specific economic makeup (all of our diverse clusters) and the relatively significant barriers to success for small and minority-owned businesses in our state.
2) The incredible opportunity to take advantage of the living laboratory that is our economy: We have so many stories of incredible success and disappointing failure that you could learn from, not to mention the way that you could use all the new companies that form each year as guinea pigs to try out new initiatives on.
3) And, of course, a local foundation would be more likely to invest significantly in our region: I could only find one grant – to the UW’s Foster School of Business – that Kauffman made in our state.

So what does it take to make something like that happen? As far as I can figure, all we really need is a rich person or persons with a passion for entrepreneurship to endow a foundation. C’mon, there’s got to be 20 within a stone’s throw of me right now…and I’m not even in Bellevue or Redmond. I think you’d start by getting the Foster School together with the Seattle Foundation (they have been focusing on the economy as a foundation of a healthy community, so they already get the connection between philanthropy and entrepreneurship), maybe some of the innovation-focused associations like the Technology Alliance, and the small business associations like the Urban Enterprise Center of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. It’s at least worth a conversation, and just think about all the great innovations that come out of our community that would have a greater chance of success!