entrepreneurship : Featured Stories

This week: a heads-up about a July class in the University of Minnesota's extension division that will fill you in on the local craft beer revolution--it's origins, its economics, its varied business models, and more. Requirements include the actual consumption of product.

The young entrepreneur's Royal Bangkok Restaurant is just one of the Vong family businesses at 315 University Avenue--a building that enshrines the enterprise and hope of a clan whose patriarch fled Cambodia in the wake of the Khmer Rouge.

If you're on the board of directors of HUGE Theater in Minneapolis, you have to improvise. That is, you have to actually go onstage and do improv in a three-evening run that is also an official series of board meetings.

For artist/gallerist Pete Driessen and the theater artists of Off-Leash Area, turning their garages into art spaces provided opportunities for innovation, experimentation, and freedom, very close to home. And the neighbors don't mind a bit.

The onetime marketing professional made a career u-turn when he discovered how gardening--and cooking and eating healthy produce right from the soil--could change lives. Now his nonprofit startup helps inner-city newcomers to gardening make healthy foods part of their lives.

While the Twin Cities duke it out with Portland over which metropolis sets the gold standard of bike culture, other cities--some of them unlikely--are becoming serious players in the boom. Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, DC, and Tampa are among the places where ingenious entrepreneurs are "riding" the new bike culture,

It came into my mailbox the other day--Minneapolis' first-ever study of the impact of the creative sector on the city's bottom line, in terms of sales and employment. There were points of pride, surprises, and caveats, along with ample proof that the arts pull more than their weight in bringing prosperity to the city.

The local office of the Chicago-based Women's Business Development Center gives majority-women-owned ventures here support and connections they might not otherwise have--as long as they can pass a rigorous qualifying process. It's women helping women to shatter the glass ceiling.

The nonprofit Springboard for the Arts used to concentrate solely on career development for artists. Now, under the leadership of Laura Zabel, it's become a powerful force in redefining the whole relationship between artists and the communities they live in--and in marshaling artistic creativity to improve those communities.

She was the key consultant on the Knight Foundation/Gallup Soul of the Community project, which looked at why people love where they live and how that attachment can drive economic development. The in-demand placemaker is the star attraction at a weeklong series of discussions next week, cosponsored by The Line.

From Greenville, North Carolina to Baltimore, from Tampa to Denver to Cleveland to the Twin Cities, tech savvy, entrepreneurship, and investment are coming together to create bright clusters of digital innovation.

This week: A new incarnation for what may be the only pan-African restaurant in the Twin Cities--and a fan of West African cuisine has a delicious lunch of Jolof rice and chicken.

While the dynamic CoCo garners the headlines, a quiet coworking space at the edge of downtown Minneapolis welcomes solo entrepreneurs in search of a more serene scene. Owner Jackie Menne understands the needs of one-person, payroll-less microbusinesses--after all, Joule is a microbusiness itself.

What if, instead of you going to a farmers market, the market came to you? That's the vision of an entrepreneurial couple who want to create a fleet of truck-drawn trailers full of food from local farms. They're calling on Kickstarter for help and betting that the market for fresh, local food can only, well, grow.

As the building phase of the Central Corridor line finishes up, it's becoming clear that--thankfully--the direst predictions of business disruption didn't materialize. Now enterprises up and down the corridor are getting used to the new normal.