RACE TO INNOVATION

Bamforth and Zwahlen present a blueprint for more effective entrepreneurship centering around five key ideas.

The authors open their book about entrepreneurship with an overview that takes in both the unprecedented opportunities America offers for innovation and startups and the stark unevenness of the American social landscape. As they note, average life expectancy in some parts of Chicago can be 30 years higher than in neighboring ZIP codes, and many of these inequalities break along racial lines. Bamforth and Zwahlen write that “Black entrepreneurs and Black businesses are under-capitalized, under-resourced, and insufficiently supported,” which makes the entire nation “many times poorer” as a result. The authors claim the market benefits from improving levels of diversity, equity, and inclusion to foster innovation and build prosperity. On the road to this goal, they mark out five “road signs” identifying best practices; these include recognizing potential, harnessing the power of enclaves, enabling ownership, using the “unique lens” that can be provided by diverse entrepreneurs and innovators, and “accelerating transformative change” to “seize opportunities, grow, and build value at an accelerated pace.” In these pages, Bamforth and Zwahlen and their guest contributors employ a number of formats, from bulleted summaries to industry case studies to interviews with innovators, to flesh out these basic principles.

This varied approach makes the book smoothly readable. The authors effectively buttress their broader thoughts on diversity and entrepreneurship with specific examples, including profiles of some of the many people doing the work on the ground. They tell the story of Marcus Whitney, for instance, the co-starter of a fund for health care startups who angrily corresponded with the Nashville Health Care Leadership Council about its lack of support for the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020. “How is it possible,” Whitney asks, addressing institutional racial imbalances, “that the nation’s leading healthcare services cluster has generated incredible wealth for White people in Nashville but no meaningful wealth for Nashville’s Black community?” Bamforth and Zwahlen also profile Shuchin Shukla, a son of Indian immigrants who served in rural, impoverished communities in Appalachia ravaged by the opioid epidemic. “His level of talent and commitment,” the authors write, nodding to the advantages of diversity, “could not have been recruited without a hands-on, deeply embedded approach to ideation and problem-solving.” Bamforth and Zwahlen also skillfully incorporate brief vignettes from the history of diversity struggles, such as the “fight of the century” between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling in 1938, which Louis won in a knockout (“The celebrations in Black neighborhoods lasted for days”). Running throughout all these stories, carefully highlighted by the authors but never overstressed, are “associations between diversity, innovation, and performance.” Readers not as enthused about the subject as Bamforth and Zwahlen may find some of those associations a bit elusive, but the powerful examples found on virtually every page combine to form a convincing argument that inclusion and equity are practical keys to improving entrepreneurship for all communities.

A bracing call for strengthening diversity fueled by stories of people on the front lines working to do just that.