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Week of January 12 - 18, 2009 |
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Digital Transformation via Economic Stimulus Invest $30 billion in America’s information technology (IT) infrastructure, and you may create as many as 949,000 jobs. That’s the bottom line number for a new economic stimulus package proposed last week by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). ITIF researchers argue that the economic stimulus package should not be used only to build and upgrade traditional infrastructure. Investments in new IT infrastructure are also needed. They propose three primary categories of new investments:
Download the January 2009 Information Technology and Innovation Foundation report, “The Digital Road to Recovery: A Stimulus Plan to Create Jobs, Boost Productivity, and Revitalize America,” by Robert D. Atkinson, Daniel Castro, and Stephen J. Ezell. |
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The National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its Technology
Innovation Program (TIP) are looking for some good ideas. They have
recently announced a call for White Papers from all interested parties
who have thoughts and suggestions for “critical national needs” that
could be addressed via the TIP initiative. TIP is designed to make
research investments in businesses, research institutions, and other
entities for projects designed to address pressing national needs. For
example, in 2008, TIP invested in projects related to inspecting,
monitoring, and evaluating key infrastructure components such as
bridges, sewer systems, and the like. The call for White Papers is
designed to solicit new ideas for target areas such as manufacturing,
personalized medicine, nanomaterials, and a host of other research
areas. If you have ideas, there are a number of different deadlines to
submit White Papers. |
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Hot New Student-Based Innovations The latest issue of
The New York Times’ Education Life supplement contains an interesting
look at the growth of entrepreneurship education on college campuses. As
part of this article, Education Life also lists “23 Bright Ideas,” i.e.,
interesting inventions and innovations developed by current college
students. Some these bright ideas include: gluten-free Play-Doh (known
as Soy-Doh); an iPhone application that streams movie times, reviews,
and maps to theaters; a new kind of electric motorcycle (the Uno); a
fruit bowl that retards food spoilage; and an edible film that can be
used to deliver oral vaccines to children. As these examples attest, the
spirit of innovation is alive and well on America’s college campuses.
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The Power of Educational Benchmarking
If the US hopes to maintain an
international leadership position in education and human capital, it
needs to do a better job of learning from other countries, societies,
and institutions that often do a better job of preparing young people to
prosper in the 21st century economy. A new report from the National
Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and
Achieve, Inc., argues that American educators must do benchmarking right
if they truly want to achieve world-class educational outcomes. For
many, benchmarking is a simple process of comparing yourself to others
or setting up performance targets or “benchmarks.” If done right,
benchmarking is a more rigorous exercise that seeks to study those who
perform better and to integrate those lessons into one’s own operations
and programs. In education, this means that American educators need to
look overseas and to track student and educator performance on best in
class international standards. It is insufficient for American states to
simply compare themselves to one another or even to review their own
performance from a historical perspective. They need to ensure that
their state education performance is not simply among the best in the
US, but is among the best in the world. |
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Quality Management and the Business Bottom Line There
are a lot of interesting theories and methodologies about effective
business management practices, but, in many cases, there’s not as much
on-the-ground evidence that these so-called “best practices” make a firm
more profitable. New research from Harvard Business School takes a hard
look at the use of one such methodology: the ISO 9001 Standard for
Quality Management. ISO 9001 prescribes a method for improving
management and production processes, and it is very popular, having been
adopted by more than 900,000 organizations worldwide. The researchers
compared nearly 1,000 California-based firms who had adopted ISO 9001 to
a matched control group of firms who did not deploy the system. The ISO
9001 adopters had much lower organizational death rates, and
outperformed the control group on nearly every measure of company
performance, such as sales growth, employment, and average annual
earnings. The findings suggest that ISO certification is not just a
management “fad,” but a powerful tool to improve company performance.
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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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National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship
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stories © 2009 The Public Forum Institute
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