Unleashing Hidden Potential: The Power of Entrepreneurship for All

Dr. John Bramforth is an innovation leader, entrepreneur, and co-author of Race to Innovation: Unleashing the Power of Entrepreneurship for Everyone. With more than 30 years of experience as a senior executive and Chief Marketing Officer in Fortune 200 companies, Dr. Bramforth has built and led global teams and launched high-growth ventures across multiple industries. His work focuses on unlocking overlooked entrepreneurial potential, particularly within underrepresented and marginalized communities. Through research, teaching, venture studios, and impact-driven initiatives, he champions ownership, community-based ecosystems, and inclusive innovation as engines for economic growth and lasting social change.

Summary

In this episode of The Nonprofit Exchange, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. John Bamford, co-author of the book Race to Innovation: Unleashing the Power of Entrepreneurship for Everyone. Dr. Bamford challenges the common belief that America lacks innovative ideas, arguing instead that we face an innovation deficit due to the neglect of entrepreneurial talent in overlooked communities, particularly among Black and marginalized groups.

Throughout our conversation, we explored the premise that entrepreneurship and innovation thrive on recognizing hidden potential in individuals and communities that are often ignored. Dr. Bamford shared insights from his extensive experience in corporate leadership and his work with diverse teams, emphasizing that diverse perspectives lead to greater innovation and success.

We discussed the concept of America’s innovation deficit, highlighting how redirecting resources to underserved communities can benefit the entire economy rather than detract from it. Dr. Bamford provided compelling examples, including a successful initiative in Western North Carolina that addressed the opioid crisis by leveraging local knowledge and expertise.

The discussion also touched on the importance of ownership and generational wealth, illustrating how empowering individuals from marginalized communities to become business owners can lead to transformative change. Dr. Bamford emphasized the need for nonprofits and community organizations to adopt innovative approaches that recognize and nurture potential in all individuals.

As we wrapped up, Dr. Bamford encouraged listeners to approach interactions with an open mind, avoiding assumptions about people’s backgrounds and capabilities. This mindset can unlock extraordinary opportunities for collaboration and growth.

This episode serves as a powerful reminder that the future of our economy and communities lies in our ability to recognize, support, and invest in the untapped potential that exists all around us. I hope you find inspiration in Dr. Bamford’s insights and consider how you can contribute to fostering innovation in your own community.

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou

Okay. Welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. This is Hugh Ballou, founder and president of SynerVision Leadership Foundation, where leaders create synergy in their teams by being very clear about their vision. That’s the starting point. Doesn’t end there. So we’re going to learn a lot more today about some… Well, the title of today’s episode is Unleashing the Power of Entrepreneurship for All. So today, my guest is Dr. John Bamford. He’s co-author of Race to Innovation, Unleashing the Power of Entrepreneurship for Everyone. In his book, Dr. Bamford challenges the assumption that America lacks ideas. and instead argues that we are facing an innovation deficit because vast amounts of entrepreneurial talent and market insight remain overlooked, underfunded, and unsupported. Through history, research, and real-world examples, particularly from black and marginal communities, Race to Innovation reframes entrepreneurship, not just as an economic engine, but a pathway to transformative change for individuals, communities, and the nations. Dr. Branford, welcome. It’s a great pleasure to have you with us at the Nonprofit Exchange. Hugh, it’s great to be here.

Dr. John Bramforth

Look forward to our conversation.

Hugh Ballou

Well, I do too. There’s just so much to discover. Entrepreneurship and innovation are premised on the recognition of hidden potential, especially in people, communities, and markets that others have ignored. Say more about that premise. Yeah, sure.

Dr. John Bramforth

So we traditionally, in this country, and frankly, outside of the US as well, the innovation communities built for people like you and I here, you know, generally a little bit older, white folks, white guys usually. In the book, we spend a lot of time digging in one particular community into the African American community. And as you can tell from my accent, I’m not originally from the US. I’m a US citizen, been here 25 years. But in many ways, my journey here in the U.S. has been a learning experience and certainly spending time with the African-American entrepreneurial community. We learned a lot from the history of that community and entrepreneurship, but also bringing it fast forward to the current day. And, you know, that’s just one example. I think about rural white America again. you know, venture capital, private equity, generally speaking, doesn’t go to these communities to look for the next great idea, the next entrepreneurial idea. And so that’s what the book’s essentially about is, let’s find ways to uncover these opportunities in these communities that usually aren’t looked at.

Hugh Ballou

For almost two decades, I spoke at a national business growth conference. People would come with their ideas because they said, my family said, oh, no, no, that’s silly. Get a job. And so it’s the tendency for even family and friends to squelch a job. So do you have a copy of your book handy that you could show us? I do. I do. Here you go. What was the background on that, the inspiration for the book, and why now?

Dr. John Bramforth

You know, I spent 30 years as a Fortune 200 company. I was chief marketing officer there. The good fortune I had here in that role, particularly towards the back end of my career, was to build and run global businesses and build global teams. And what that exposed me to was the richness in bringing such diverse talent into a single team. So if I think about what you were talking about earlier, from a leadership perspective, being given the gift to go out and find the best talent from around the world and bring them into one team, it really is a blessing. But my main learning from that experience, and it caused me to look into the data, is those teams, those really diverse, globally diverse teams, were more innovative and seemed to perform better. When I dug into McKinsey data and a whole bunch of other data, that was reinforced that this is a theme that people had seen time and time again, is that mix of cultures. caused organizations and teams to be really innovative. And that caused us to, as we were looking at writing the book, to dig even deeper into this concept of there are great opportunities hidden away. in these communities that we need to find ways to encourage for the benefit of the country, frankly, encourage these communities to bring out that innovation, turn them into companies, you know, grow them into economic drivers for the for the country. And, you know, that’s the work we’ve been doing ever since.

Hugh Ballou

That’s fascinating. That’s fascinating. I live in a creative world, but I also realize as a conductor, it’s right, left brain thinking. You got to structure. You got to be creative. And many people don’t put those together. So you talked about America’s innovation deficit. Talk about that a little bit more. And what does that mean?

Dr. John Bramforth

Sure. I mean, if you look right now, there is, you know, if you’re only unlocking a small percentage of the community and, you know, there’s a dialogue that goes on often within entrepreneurship and with innovation that if we encourage some of these communities to innovate and we support them with capital influxes, that it’s to the detriment of the majority. So again, going back to people like you and me who find it relatively easy to find capital, If we redirect that capital to these communities like rural white America, somehow that will be a zero sum game and there’ll be a deficit to the majority of folks. That’s not something that we’ve seen evidence of. In fact, I would argue and will continue to argue quite the opposite. If we can find ways to unlock this rich potential within these communities, it will benefit all of us. The economic growth that will come to the US, and frankly, any country that embraces this concept, is rich, fruitful, and will actually, I think, change the culture of the countries that implement these types of ideas.

Hugh Ballou

One of the grammatically incorrect statements that Southerners use is, none of us is as smart as all of us. So I think I deal with, as a leadership coach, I deal with a lot of leaders that have blind spots, which is probably all of us. And so part of what you’re describing are some blind spots, because even in, you said some of the underserved communities are rural communities, and in Virginia, we have lots of those. And there’s this scarcity mindset, which our main audience is nonprofits. Many of those work and serve people in rural communities, but we have our own blind spots and our own limiting beliefs. How does that play into what you’re talking about?

Dr. John Bramforth

Well, I’ll share one example, which is an example of a company we built at Carolina probably two years ago now. So we were given some money from the state legislature when I was working at Carolina from the first opioid settlement funds. And they came to us and said, look, can you go use your, at the time we had a venture studio developing digital health companies. they said to us, can you come up with some solutions from this money? Can you put this money to work? So we went to the part of North Carolina that was most challenged by the opioid crisis. We went to Western North Carolina, into the mountains, and we sat down with healthcare professionals in that community and asked them to tell us you know, about the opioid crisis and tell us about some of the solutions they were using and how they would solve the opioid crisis. And they gave us several ideas, one of which was a company called, that became a company called Goldie Health, which is a company that surrounds care around a patient who’s just gone through an opioid overdose. And that company’s doing extremely well. It’s just about to go through a series A round of financing. But those concepts, you know, if we hadn’t gone to Western North Carolina, where the understanding of the opioid crisis is the most rich, the most challenging area, I don’t think we would have found the concepts, the innovation that is embedded in that company. So by going to a community that really understood the problem, we found some really interesting solutions that are saving patients’ lives right now as that company implements across the country. So I think it’s that understanding of problems which is the essence of innovation, right? Understanding a problem and coming up with a solution to that problem. That depth of understanding is often locked up in these communities like rural Western North Carolina.

Hugh Ballou

Wow, wow. Now, I’ve worked with entrepreneurs in all races, all walks of life. And the people that succeed are the ones that are willing to do things other people are not willing to do. And I even find that all white guys like me have trouble raising capital because they really couldn’t get their head around how to describe the benefit of what they were doing to somebody that had money. But regardless of that, mainstream entrepreneurs often benefit from invisible systems like networks, social capital, there’s an unwritten playbook, enclaves. help that level of playing field. So there’s, you talk about funding, but there’s multiple forms of capital, social capital, intellectual capital, relationship capital. So how do we level a playing field and say more about enclaves and why are they important?

Dr. John Bramforth

Yeah, I mean, I think, again, I’ll use an example if that’s okay, and it’s a historical example. You know, we launched the book in a place called Greenwood, Oklahoma. And for those that don’t know Greenwood and the story behind Greenwood, Greenwood was known for a long time, still is known, as Black Wall Street. And not long after the Trail of Tears, there was a boon, neighborhood in Tulsa that was basically a mecca in many ways for the African American community. They built this unbelievable entrepreneurial enclave where, interestingly, there were no banks This was all self-funded. There were a couple of African-American individuals who were very successful. They self-funded that community to drive innovation entrepreneurship. Now, historically, it ended up in tragedy. The local community didn’t like the success that they were seeing, and Greenwood was burnt to the ground. Many people lost their lives. There’s an amazing museum in Greenwood that tells that story. But nonetheless, what it really tells you is, how did that happen? It happened because a group of individuals with like-minded beliefs in a community got together to grow and help each other grow as a community. And I think that’s the sort of richness that I think this mentality can breed, right? It can breed across the country in almost any community we can think about if the mindset is correct, if the leadership, to your point earlier, is in place that opens their minds to the possibilities.

Hugh Ballou

Wow, that is so on target if you’re just coming by the video or just catching on this is the non-profit exchange you can find this episode and others at the Non-profit exchange org and this this one will be there And by the way, there’s a lot of great ideas. Don’t feel like you have to jot them all down write down action notes What are you gonna do about these ideas? You can go to that website. You can get the full transcript So you’re not gonna miss any of this. So John this is so helpful today. So Our niche is the community charities, the small nonprofits that make a difference. So how do those neighborhoods, those small churches, family networks, et cetera, and the local charities, how can they work together to be innovation accelerators?

Dr. John Bramforth

Yeah, I mean, the reality is innovation does not have to be innovation for business purposes. I mean, you can have innovation that’s in the frame of a nonprofit. In fact, my wife and I have a foundation, a nonprofit that is focused on a couple of things. It’s focused on impact investing in early healthcare startups, but then bringing in disadvantaged talent and providing scholarships and internships around those businesses. There are different ways that a nonprofit can structure themselves in thoughtful and innovative ways to encourage communities to prosper. There are ways to bring in funding into a community that encourages this type of mentality. And I think educating communities around the possibilities that these ideas frame, I think, hold as much for nonprofit organizations as they do for for-profit organizations. And so I think I’ll use one of the principles in the book, realizing potential and seeing potential individuals. Well, that holds for nonprofits as much as it does for for-profit companies. When that person sits in front of you for the first time, assume they have high potential. Potential for good, right? Don’t get wrapped up in your own biases. If you assume that person in front of you can do great things, it’s remarkable what can happen. I’ll share one example. I had a young lady come to see me who was actually a backup candidate for a job we had at Carolina at UNC. I asked her one question at the start of the interview to tell me about why she’d given up her college. She had a stop-start college career. had a couple of years at a university and then dropped out for a couple of years, then came back and finished her undergraduate degree and was running a lab within the Department of Medicine. I asked her about it and said, why did you do that? And she told me this amazing story about giving up to look after two elderly grandparents that she realized that their nutrition was not very good. They were in rural South Carolina in a food desert. She transformed that she thought she was gonna go to spend time with them. They both had chronic illnesses. To help them as they came towards the back end of their lives, by changing their diet, she got them both onto a healthy trajectory for the long term. So once she kind of fixed that, she went back to college. I had made an assumption that the reason she dropped out was for basically not good reasons. When she told me that story, I couldn’t hire her quick enough. because this told me about her as a human being. And so I think if you don’t go into the first interaction with a person with preconceived ideas, you assume good, you assume potential. It’s amazing. That individual now, True story. She is in the middle of doing a PhD at Carolina in the School of Public Health, and she has a startup company in the food space because she’s a co-author in this book, a contributing author in this book. She has her own book on gardening that she published before this book. And she now has a startup company and is doing a PhD. African American lady, her story’s in the book. But that’s what happens if you go in there with a mindset of, this could be the next great entrepreneur. This could be the next great leader of a nonprofit. I’ve just not met them yet.

Hugh Ballou

Or there could be an ordinary person that does some extraordinary things in a local scale. That’s a place for everybody. So let’s talk about ownership. There’s a recurring theme in your book about ownership. So talk about ownership, contrasting to a paying job, to ownership in terms of generational wealth and systemic change and independence.

Dr. John Bramforth

Yeah, so we all know stories of entrepreneurs that have done extremely well, and it is usually transformed. I mean, I would argue our current president and had the good fortune to have parents who were successful entrepreneurs. And because of that, he was given a headstart in building his own net worth. There are examples time and time again of generational wealth causing transformative change. The challenge is many of these underserved communities aren’t represented with that opportunity. And so accelerating the chances of folks from these communities to be owners of a business can be remarkably transformational. And the assumption sometimes within the majority community, and I’ll share two interviews that I had during the book, during writing the book. I talked to a private equity firm, really, really good private equity firm out of New York, The managing partners are really good guy. But I was asking him about these changes and he said, John, we’re just going to have to be patient. This is going to take time. He was putting females and people of color onto his boards when he created companies, but he felt like this was going to take time. Contrast that with an interview I had with a gentleman called Marcus Whitney, who set up a venture firm, a healthcare venture firm in Nashville, Tennessee, for companies that were being built by African-American entrepreneurs. The contrast in his conversation, or the conversation I had with Marcus was, I don’t have enough money for the number of black entrepreneurs who are coming to me with ideas. So unlike the assumptions that are being made by the private equity managing partner, The reality is that these opportunities are out there to build real generational wealth within these communities if we look hard at it.

Hugh Ballou

You know, and people come to me for various reasons, and I would say over half of the people I work with are black, and they, black communities, and they have amazing ideas. But they break the barriers of the community wanting to say, who do you think you are to get a job? They break the barriers of wanting to, to reach out because instead of framing things as obstacles, they frame them as opportunities to solve the problem. And that’s a whole different mindset. So in the strategic planning process that I lead people through, part of it, the multi-step process is to identify your unique value proposition. What do you bring to the world that’s different than everybody else? But there’s a piece under that. which is our unique value we bring. So you talk about a unique lens on opportunity. So our lived experience as entrepreneurs, how does that help entrepreneurs identify the unmet need and bring something different to the table that nobody else sees?

Dr. John Bramforth

And you know that again, to share an example from the book, probably the best example of that is Rihanna. the musician who has had a very successful music career, but that’s not where her net worth is from. She’s a billionaire. I think she was the first African American female billionaire, I think. No, it was built because she recognized from her own lived experience, an opportunity in the beauty industry to provide makeup for people like her. She built a billion dollar business with Fenty beauty products that forced her to become the first billionaire, African American billionaire. That didn’t come from her music. Everyone knows her for her music, but it didn’t come from her music. It came from seeing that niche opportunity, which really wasn’t that niche opportunity for people like her.

Hugh Ballou

I’m gonna want to get this book the story, you know stories speak to people in a very different way than the how-to books So the big picture of this you’ve come out with a book. It’s very timely So why is this topic so important right now for our community our economy and our future?

Dr. John Bramforth

Yeah, well we’re coming up to the 250th anniversary of the country And we have plenty of challenges, plenty of challenges. And, you know, probably the biggest challenge for me is we’re very polarized, or at least we look like we are very polarized. The reality is, I think, somewhat different. I would argue that there’s 80% of us in the middle looking both sides going, what is going on? And the majority of us like, this is not, you know, I came as an immigrant to this country, I’m a citizen. This is not why I came to the United States of America. I came because this was the land of opportunity. This was the shining light on the hill. And that’s what excited me about being a US citizen. This is a time for us to say, look, this is not about, this is not a them and us. This is about who we are, who we’ve, I would argue, we’ve always been as a country, being for the betterment of all of us. And frankly, I go a little bit step further than that, because I think there’ll be a benefit to us as a country if we have a similar mindset to folks outside the US too. Because I go home to England, I spend time in England, people are saying, say to me, what is going on? And they get a representation of this country that I don’t think is true, because they just read the headlines. And they don’t know people like you, right? They don’t know people and have the dialogue that we’re having today. And so the reason for this is to say, look, guys, this is not zero sun. This is not them against us. This is not fuel his company, not her company. This is about if we walk down the path together, then we put the benefit of all of us, particularly as we hit this 250th anniversary. That’s how we’re going to grow as a country. That’s how we’re going to grow as an economy by having an open mind to other people.

Hugh Ballou

The future is in the hands of our local entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs that are doing good. And it’s a new way of, before we’ve come close to the end of this great interview, I want to let people have a, let you talk about your website. What’s the URL for your website?

Dr. John Bramforth

Yes, www.RaceToInnovation.net.

Hugh Ballou

There’s some listening, some watching. So walk us through what people will find, please.

Dr. John Bramforth

Yeah. On the website, you’ll find, obviously, a link to where you can purchase the book. It’s the usual places like Amazon. You’ll see some other links to other podcasts that we’ve done. And if you need, thankfully, we just won a few awards. You’ll see a few awards up there as well. And you’ll see the details of everybody who was involved in writing the book. Roy and I, as two white dudes, were a little nervous about writing about the African-American community, so we needed help. And you’ll see our contributing authors on the website as well, who kept us honest, kept us on the straight and narrow, and helped to make sure that as we talked about, in particular, the African-American community, that we were doing it in the right way. So we’ve learned a lot. We still are learning about this area and this space, but we’d love to hear from people and we’d love to get feedback on the book.

Hugh Ballou

Great, great. This book is a goldmine of really, really valuable resources. So if listeners take just one action after this conversation and reading your book, what should it be?

Dr. John Bramforth

Yeah, I would say don’t assume. And what I mean by that is when you get somebody in front of you that looks, who comes from a completely different background to you, who looks completely different to you, don’t assume. Open your mind to the possibilities. You know, this may be the next greatest entrepreneur that you’re ever going to meet, and you may be have the good fortune to help them on their journey. If you have the mindset to be open to learning something new about somebody who comes from a completely different background to you.

Hugh Ballou

Amen. Dr. Bamford, thank you so much for this thoughtful and challenging conversation. Your work is expanding how we think about innovation, opportunity, and ownership. Race to innovation reminds us the future is not limited by lack of ideas, but whether we are willing to recognize, support, and invest in potential that has been there all along. I’ve done 625 of these interviews. This is a one of a kind. This is so precious. So, Dr. John Philip Brantford, thank you for being my guest today on The Nonprofit Exchange.

Dr. John Bramforth

A great pleasure, Hugh. Thanks for your time.