UAB seeks tie to group helping urban business Effort would strengthen small, minority-owned firms

BYLINE: ROY L. WILLIAMS News staff writer

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

The University of Alabama at Birmingham wants to join a national organization that aims to groom successful inner-city businesses.

By becoming involved with the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, the university seeks to help managers of struggling minority-owned and other small firms gain skills to grow and thrive, said UAB Business Dean Bob Holmes.

''We hope to get this program started by January or early 2007,'' Holmes said. ''It will be a great complement to other efforts we have here to help minority businesses succeed.''

The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City is a nonprofit started in Boston in 1994 by Michael E. Porter, a Harvard University business professor who has been noted for his strategies to turn around inner cities. The program promotes inner-city economic development Wants to groom inner-city firms 8C with research partners across the country, including Boston Consulting Group and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The agency publishes an annual list of the 100 fastest-growing private companies based in America's inner cities. Holmes, who met Porter while working at Babson College in Boston a decade ago, said UAB would join several urban universities across the country that work with the program.

''It's a good program, one I've been wanting to join since I came here,'' Holmes said. ''The key for it to work here is it would require some of our faculty to get behind it.''

Holmes said the initiative uses masters' in business administration programs to provide consulting services for inner-city businesses. ''It's been very successful and led to improved economic opportunities for innercity businesses across the country. That is what I envision us being able to do.''

Efforts to reach the program's officials were unsuccessful. Holmes said he has also begun working with Bob Dickerson, director of Birmingham Business Research Center, to help his group assist area minority firms.

''Being the area's largest employer, UAB is in the position to do something about this and hopefully will spark other large companies to help black businesses succeed,'' Dickerson said. ''We all need to do more, especially the banks and area governments.''

George Munchus, executive director of UAB's management faculty society, said the program could make a difference to black businesses in Birmingham. ''We will need both black and white faculty to get behind this because poverty affects everyone, not just blacks,'' he said.

Munchus and UAB business professor Vickie Cox Edmondson are members of the Disparity Task Force examining why minority firms received only 2.2 percent of construction dollars Birmingham awarded last year, down from 9.3 percent in 1990.

Holmes said UAB's minority and women business program, headed by George Perdue, is trying to improve the percentage of minority firms that get construction and service contracts at UAB, which has more than 13,000 full-time employees.

Brenda Cox, procurement specialist and counselor at UAB's Small Business Development Center, said her agency has several free training programs and other low-cost classes to help create more successful minority and womenowned firms.

''We can help them get procurement and minority certification to get loans, but not enough companies take advantage of our services,'' Cox said.

EMAIL: rwilliams@bhamnews.com