The Innovation Blind Spot

““A pioneering fusion of venture capital and crowd intelligence.” —Matt Bishop, editor for the Economist and author of Philanthrocapitalism “Baird’s motivation for writing the book comes from an insider’s knowledge that the system isn’t allocating resources to the best and the brightest, just to the best connected and most visible.” —Fast Company “Every entrepreneur with a great idea should have a fundamental right to start a business. But today, far too many barriers in society prevent the best people from competing. In this book, Baird outlines compelling strategies to find the best innovations—no matter where they are.” —Wendy Guillies, president and CEO, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation “In this time of seismic shifts, our businesses, our governments, and our communities need to work together for our society to succeed—and we need new ideas to get there. Baird identifies the outliers that no one’s betting on and compellingly outlines how we can bring them into the mainstream.” —Governor Deval L. Patrick, managing director, Bain Capital Double Impact “Every single city and community has the power to change the world. But to realize that power, we have to find the ideas and entrepreneurs that people aren’t paying attention to. In The Innovation Blind Spot, Baird shows us how to do just that.” —Brad Feld, cofounder, Foundry Group”

Ross Baird is an entrepreneur and investor who is best known for finding, developing, and investing in entrepreneurs in places and industries where most people aren’t looking. He founded Village Capital in 2009 and has worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs in over fifty countries since then. He has visited over a hundred cities worldwide by train, plane, and bus in an effort to find new entrepreneurs and help people supporting them, and he and Village Capital have partnered with over twenty Fortune 500 companies to help large institutions uncover new innovations. Before joining Village Capital, Ross worked for a venture capital firm and was on the founding team of four different startups.

Ross and his work have been featured by more than fifty media outlets including the New York Times, Bloomberg Business Week, Inc., and FastCompany. He has also lectured in entrepreneurship at the University of Virginia since 2012. He has a MPhil from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from the University of Virginia, where he was a Truman Scholar and a Jefferson Scholar.