CLEVELAND, Ohio -- During a recent Fulbright year in Vietnam, Michael Goldberg, an entrepreneurship instructor at Case Western Reserve University, shared American business strategies with a nation of mom-and-pop shops hungry to do more.
Can you help us grow a new economy, government ministers asked him. Can you show us how to be Silicon Valley?
No, I can't, Goldberg said. But have you heard of Cleveland?
As Goldberg described a hardworking manufacturing city, one that finessed its way into high tech fields with little help from venture capitalists or angel investors, the Vietnamese began to see a place they understood.
Word of a DIY start-up scene spread to other striving cities in nations that had looked longingly toward California. Goldberg's premise, that Cleveland offers the more realistic business model, is gaining followers like a kind religion.
In March, he's off to Budapest, Hungary, with a group of graduate students to talk strategy with a business incubator. In June, Greece beckons. An Athens university wants to translate his lectures into Greek. Meanwhile, he's been advising a start-up accelerator in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.