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Week of August 4 - 10, 2008

The Innovation Avalanche

Is innovation everywhere? It sometimes seems that way with the avalanche of new products, services, and technologies that seem to enter the market on a daily, if not hourly, basis. The website Trendwatching.com takes a closer look at this “innovation avalanche” with a review of “41 new business ideas to be copied, er, get inspired by.” There are many exciting and some crazy new businesses profiled in the briefing. A few examples include: BeerBankroll, a British effort to start a community-based brewery; Toronto’s Parkingspots.com, a firm that allows users to rent unused parking spots; Edible, a producer and marketer of edible insects; and 5starbaby.com, a new site that allows new parents to advertise new births with announcements that look like movie posters.

Download the 2008 Trendwatching briefing, “The Innovation Avalanche.”

Interesting Regional Experiments (Part 1)

Over the past few months a number of local and regional initiatives designed to help support local entrepreneurs and to build local innovation hotspots have garnered increased attention. This issue will look at two efforts—from Michigan and Cleveland, Ohio—while next week’s issue will highlight efforts in Iowa and Utah:

• Michigan Initiative for Innovation and Entrepreneurship
  Michigan’s approach to nurturing entrepreneurs seeks to capitalize on its strong base of colleges and universities. The Michigan Initiative for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (MIIE) provides grants to state educational institutions with the goal of building a strong statewide support system and culture, and, in the process, spawning 200 new start-ups in the next decade. The first round of MIEE grants was recently announced, and a second round will occur in the Fall. Among the projects funded in July are a new commercialization center at Wayne State University’s Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics, a new entrepreneurship education initiative at the University of Michigan-Flint, and a host of entrepreneurship internship initiatives at colleges across the state.
  
  Learn more about the Michigan Initiative for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

• Cleveland’s Talent Blueprint
  Cleveland has decided to get aggressive in its efforts to win the “war for talent.” A new region-wide initiative, the Talent Blueprint Project, seeks to transform Cleveland into a preferred destination for foreign-born scientists and technologists. Among the Blueprint strategies are designating Cleveland as a “High-Skill Immigration Zone” where the region has a higher cap for the use of H1B Visas, the specialized visa category for skilled workers. In addition, Cleveland will also create a virtual and physical “welcome center” to help new immigrants acclimate themselves to their new communities. A final strategy involves hosting an immigration investment center in the city. These centers provide a fast-track path to US citizenship for immigrants who invest in companies that create at least ten jobs. While the Blueprint is still in the blueprint phase, these ideas could certainly help bring new talent and ideas to Northeast Ohio.
  
  The Cleveland Talent Blueprint Project is featured in a July 8, 2008 Cleveland Plain Dealer article, “Talent Blueprint Project promotes bringing in foreign-born business talent,” by Tom Breckenridge.

New Plan to Address Entrepreneurial Workforce Needs

The big political challenge around economic globalization concerns how best to assist and support those whose livelihoods are adversely affected by economic competition. Observers from all sides of the political spectrum agree that the US government does a poor job on this front, and lots of interesting new ideas are bubbling up about how best to assist dislocated workers. The Financial Services Forum has recently presented a new approach crafted by alumni of both the Bush and Clinton Administrations. The authors propose a new Adjustment Assistance Program (AAP) that would commit $22 billion annually to provide a wider menu of benefit options for workers affected by globalization and technological change. The AAP would provide, among other things, wage loss insurance to workers struggling to find new jobs at wages comparable to their previous employment, continued health insurance while unemployed, and enhanced eligibility for various training programs. The proposed program will help ease the transition for affected workers by providing them with a stronger safety net as well as incentives to retrain and build a prosperous new career in alternative fields.

Download the July 2008 Financial Services Forum White Paper, "Succeeding in the Global Economy: An Adjustment Assistance Program for American Workers," by Grant D. Aldonas, Robert Z. Lawrence, and Matthew J. Slaughter.

Small Business Owners Glum

Small business owners are perennial optimists, but even they are getting pretty glum about today’s economic conditions. The latest Small Business Trends analysis from the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) confirms that small business owners are preparing to hunker down for a while. Overall small business confidence is not getting appreciably worse, but it is locked at historically low levels, what the researchers refer to as “a recession level reading.” The biggest and most worrisome change in the survey is that a growing portion of small business owners are now expressing major fears of inflation. Twenty percent of surveyed small business owners identified inflation as their Number 1 problem. This is the highest level ever seen on the NFIB index since 1982. The report’s authors caution that business owner attitudes do not adequately reflect firm performance. While they are quite pessimistic, business performance numbers (in areas like capital spending and expected new hires) are fairly strong. As such, they suggest that optimism may quickly return if the economy is able to avoid a major “nose dive” in the near future.

Access the July 2008 Small Business Economic Trends analysis from the National Federation of Independent Business.

The National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship is 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 entrepreneurship around the world. Subscribe now to receive your weekly copy. Archived issues are available online.

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