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Week of October 24 - 28, 2005Welcome to the National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship, an initiative of the Public Forum Institute made possible by a grant from the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City. Through NDE-news, we bring you short summaries and analyses of various trends driving the innovation economy. Subscribe now to receive your weekly copy. Archived issues are available online. Links to the day's entrepreneurship stories from across the nation and around the world are posted each weekday on the NDE main page - bookmark it and stay informed about the latest entrepreneurship news. |
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As with anything associated with an imaginative, high-risk and little-understood field such as entrepreneurship, the latest chapters unfolding in the Kauffman Foundation's story are far from black and white philanthropy, but full of colors, new dimensions and groundbreaking vision. The Foundation teams are finding with their grantee-partners as many new questions to explore as they are discovering new insights. The new Kauffman Thoughtbook 2005 offers a series of essays and articles from Foundation associates and grantee-partners, giving a picture of what they are thinking and what they have learned in the past year. Jonathan Ortmans has an entry -- A New Conversation in America -- about the work being done through the National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship.
If you are interested in the journey through our entrepreneurial economy that Kauffman president Carl Schramm and the Foundation trustees are leading America, you can request a free copy of the Kauffman Thoughtbook 2005 at http://survey.kauffman.org/survey.cfm?id=151. |
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Global Competitiveness: It’s Better in Scandinavia?
The World Economic Forum is
out with its annual Global Competitiveness Report. The news is
good for the US (which ranks No. 2), but it’s even better for
Scandinavia as Finland (No. 1), Sweden, and Denmark all rank in the top
five countries for economic competitiveness. This report is among the
world’s most comprehensive assessments of country competitiveness. It
assesses 117 countries using dozens of indicators that measure three
primary factors: the quality of a country’s macroeconomic environment,
the state of its public institutions, and the level of its technological
readiness. A separate set of measures – the Business Competitiveness
Index (BCI) – assesses each country’s business environment. On this
measure, the US ranks No. 1 in terms of the sophistication and
productivity of US-based businesses. Other nations in the top five BCI
rankings are: Finland, Germany, Denmark, and Singapore. |
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America’s Coming Innovation Crash?
Despite high rankings from
the World Economic Forum, leading experts and researchers are getting
very worried about the state of America’s science and technology
infrastructure. The latest report of bad news comes from the prestigious
National Academy of Sciences. Their report, Rising Above the
Gathering Storm: Employing America for a Brighter Future, is a call
to arms about the state of America’s innovation economy. The report
notes that America still maintains a global lead in science and
technology fields, but also contends that this leadership is rapidly
eroding. The report includes a series of recommendations to stop this
slide. They include new investments in improving K-12 science and math
education, increasing federal investment in long term research by 10%
per year, providing 25,000 new scholarships in fields of math, science,
and engineering, and enacting a series of new tax incentives to help
further support innovative activities. This bold blueprint has gained a
lot of attention in the media, and on Capitol Hill. |
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Small Firms and Equity Finance: More Help Needed
For the past year, a joint
expert’s group from the US Department of Commerce and the European
Union’s Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry have been
meeting to seek potential solutions for a thorny problem on both sides
of the Atlantic: how to get more equity finance into the hands of new
and growing entrepreneurial businesses. The Working Group on Venture
Capital has just released its final report, and it contains a number of
useful recommendations for American and European policymakers. The
report’s primary thrust is a call for closer cooperation between the US
and Europe. It contends that since venture capital is a global industry,
policymakers should treat it accordingly. Thus, American and European
policymakers should strive to coordinate their policies for regulating
and supporting the industry. Via collaboration, American and European
governments can do a more effective job in enhancing the availability
and profitability of venture capital investments.
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An interesting set of new
articles in Technology Review takes a peek at the next generation
of web entrepreneurs. As the web has evolved, it’s taken a much
different form than the old World Wide Web. The basic vision of these
new entrepreneurs is that Web 2.0 is not a static set of pages, but is
instead an exciting platform for the delivery of new services and
products. These services, like Wikipedia (wikipedia.org) are designed to
promote collaboration and participation. These second generation
companies are also being developed in a new manner. Instead of seeking
to immediately attract massive venture capital investments,
entrepreneurs are bootstrapping their companies through smart use of
open-source software and other low cost services and products. It’s not
yet clear whether these trends are a minor blip or a sign of things to
come. However, it is clear that many new and interesting web
applications will be coming our way soon. |
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ORGANIZATIONAL SPOTLIGHT The Institute for Virtual
Enterprise As the field of entrepreneurship education advances, many interesting new teaching approaches are developing. The City University of New York’s (CUNY) Institute of Virtual Enterprise is pioneering one such method. Virtual Enterprise (VE) is an on-line business simulation program where students create, develop, and manage virtual enterprises. The simulation takes them through the entire process of starting a business, and requires them to “sell” their product in a virtual global marketplace consisting of more than 5,000 virtual firms located in forty countries. VE has been used around the globe, and has proven to be especially effective at reaching at-risk youth through its emphasis on hands-on experiential learning. The program is widely deployed in New York City’s high school and community college systems, and its use is expanding around the country and overseas. |
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