Tiffany Lin

After taking a break from her interior design career to raise a family, Jennifer Gilbert says she wanted to “get creative” again. But she quickly realized how interior design and luxury home furnishings had stagnated during her years away. She saw the inefficient, fragmented industries as being ripe for change. “I figured if someone was going to change it, why not me?” she says. Having witnessed what her husband, Quicken Loans founder and chairman Dan Gilbert, had done to bring the mortgage business online, she resolved to bring the same efficiencies to her profession.

After Detroit’s bankruptcy filing, there might not be a more apropos startup in Michigan than HealPay, an Ann Arbor company that offers a suite of cloud-based apps that enable online payment processing for various sectors. As HealPay co-founder Erick Bzovi says, debt collection “is a dirty world and the technology sucks.” The solutions he and cofounder Lance Carlson have developed streamline collections and provide electronic options that they say improve chances of collecting receivables.

Larry Morrissey was 35 and had never held a political office when he ran a successful campaign as an independent candidate to become mayor of Rockford, Ill., in 2005. Now in his third term, Morrissey is determined to bring the city where he grew up back from years of economic decline. Among efforts to bolster local business and the city’s faltering education system, he recently teamed up with the online marketplace Etsy to create a pilot program for entrepreneurship education. He says it’s a link to an era when entrepreneurship was a way of life, not something learned in grad school.

How do companies leverage the communities they build among users, and reward consumers for becoming unofficial ambassadors for their products and services? Detroit native Jeff Epstein asked this question in 2008, just as social media was coming into its own as an empowering platform for consumers. Epstein established Ambassador as a way for companies to give their biggest online evangelists a piece of the action. We spoke with him about harnessing word-of-mouth for a digital marketplace, and on Detroit as startup mecca.

With backing from Detroit Venture Partners, Matt Mosher founded hiredMYway.com in 2010. In the crowded field of online recruiting, it might have seemed an unlikely-to-succeed upstart. But as an entrepreneur since his early teens, Mosher knew how to take a fresh approach in order to coexist with the biggest names in the industry. With Detroiter moxie, he built the Swiss Army knife of recruiting sites.

Launched in 2011, Detroit's Glocal offers users a tailored local experience via online community forums. It aims to counter a loss of connection with local community that many see as a negative effect of the global hyper-connectedness driven by social media. Techonomy spoke with Glocal President Lincoln Cavalieri about the importance of zooming in on what’s happening in your own neck of the woods.

Workfolio was founded in Detroit, but today also operates out of New York. The company aims to make creating online professional profile websites intuitive for everyone in the working world. Techonomy spoke with Workfolio Founder and CEO Charles Pooley about personal branding, how he got into DIY Web design, and what sets Detroit apart from other cities.

The tech trifecta of Internet, cloud computing, and 3D printing tantalizes investors and consumers with the promises of lower distribution costs, increased productivity, reduced prices, and the free movement of information. But, as RISD President and Techonomy 2013 participant John Maeda argues in a recent LinkedIn post, contradictions abound for those in the business of creating goods and information.