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In contemporary society, entrepreneurs are the only leaders pushing forth a new and visionary economic success. As the industrial age of our nation comes to a close through means of outsourcing to nations which can produce products and/or services for a lower cost, we must look to the information age which began in the 1980's and the transition to a new American workforce, planted heavily in service industries and intellectual property. For example, as Americans, we must realize that we cannot rely on manufacturing cheaper products, or providing services in which the international market can produce for a lower price; instead, we must pride ourselves on our ability to create new markets through an intellectual process. Because America has always been based on freedom and rewards those who take risks, we have created a culture envied and copied by other countries, from our movie stars, to our lifestyles, even to the horrible fast-food we have created. Ultimately, all the envy for our highly successful nation may fade without the consistent creation of new intellectual property, innovation, and business leadership in the form of entrepreneurship. In fact, if one were to look to the exact definition of economy, it states, "economy is made up of land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship." A country may have land, a country may have labor, and a country may even have large sums of capital, but without entrepreneurship to tie all of the resources together, a country has no ability to lead, but simply an ability to follow.

Entrepreneurship has been evidenced as the driver of the US economic growth from the start of the industrial revolution. It is hinged on our unique and sometimes complicated education system that supports expression of ideas that lead to innovation.

The failure of our society to recognize the decline in scientific minded graduates coupled with a growing trend in Washington to be bugged down by minutia instead of rationalizing and compromising to come up with policies to capitalize on the effects of globalization, we are adrift as a nation.

We as Americans are being handcuffed by policy more and more as the rest of the world frees up regulations to foster innovation. For the first time, the US is looking a some level of brain drain as more and more innovators leave for more fertile grounds.

The test will be whether we allow a few financial and a few industrial organizations to control our government and economy. We still have a chance to innovate ourselves to the top of the world but only time will tell. The key areas where we could excel are environmental, energy and aerospace.

However, as a very small business that depends on a vibrant economy, I am stuck with no source of financing other than my own and now friend in government, so i will keep plugging and hope for the best. Things have sure changed since the 1990's.

I am an entrepreneur. Unlike most of the US population, I was not caught off-guard when the recession came -because I am also a student of Austrian economics & subscribe to the writings of Dr. Ron Paul & Mr. Peter Schiff. So, despite having my own personal financial crisis involving an unscrupulous business associate in 2007 (who is now in jail); -I managed to leverage over +3000% return from my humble savings -that I diverted into a specific investment when I saw the writing on the economic wall. I am all about risk-taking & delayed gratification. I also know from years of personal study that government is generally the problem --a severe one. Not only do government policies get in the way due to the backdoor agendas built into them, --but the rhetoric of government taints the minds of the public & generally blinds people to alternative ways of thinking about issues -even discouraging such talk. Earth shaking ideas always change society & it's the result of the paradigm-shift that spawns new innovations. But what happens in a society resistant to change (so resistant that government policy has indirectly locked in place the status-quo)? Just reading over the posts here -it's obvious to me that many of the contributors have been mesmerized by government-speak; --But I can tell you (law being a hobby of mine) -that much of what I read about taxes, regulations & things like patents are spoken from ignorance of the actual law about such matters and that DC does not have nearly the level of control that many people imagine it does. It's like watching a dog -held captive without a boundary by a collar that emits a sound when the dog gets near the boundary-line. And the irony is that all the other dogs bark frantic warnings when they hear rumor of the collar's sound --providing merely the peer pressure of fear to keep the dog inside an intangible fence. Let me cue you in on a secret: +90% of the time -the collar only makes a noise & can do nothing else. And having said that +90% of those reading won't believe it. And when those +90% of people -held in a mental prison set down by a matrix of misleading legal-language are also those who are "investors", -they will choose not to invest because some barking dog is freaking out about a boundary line that in reality -is an illusion (does not exist). There is an old saying -that "The truth will set you free."; --BUT ONLY the truth you KNOW. I just wanted to preface with that commentary. My invention (that I am seeking a QUALITY industry partner to venture jointly with) -reduces the energy wasted by the conventional clothes dryer -some 50-80%. The savings figures are quite impressive. The installation (via contractor) is very affordable. And the payback to the home owner is roughly 2-4 years based on use. My background in energy-management & control systems dates back to 1986 when I was doing computer-based, state-of-the-art system design. Fundamentals never change. My ideal partner would be an existing business with a solid personnel connection to the electricity-generation industry (which, -I'm told, -has the most to gain from innovations that can reduce the demand on the grid by GIGAwatt hours). - Good day.

There are two dominant themes in the majority of the comments here; they are (1) the stifling of innovation to meet the many challenges facing us today due to governmental bureaucratic obstacles in place for the benefit of large business to discourage competition from small business and (2) the crippling costs of doing business for entrepreneurial start-ups. At the same time, it is publicly acknowledged by Congress and the President that small business is being looked to as the golden goose that can lay the golden egg of our economic recovery. It follows than that the entrepreneurs should unite to lobby (by their shear number; not money) the Congress and President to do what they need to do to create the environment that will encourage, or at least allow without these unreasonable obstacles, entrepreneurs to accomplish our recovery as they are best suited to do. I know there are many associations and alliances you may already belong to. If each of you would contact any of the organizations you belong to and direct their leaders to join together in order to unify your voices, it would be a lot easier and less time consuming than to each write your congressional delegations - which may or may not get read - but a consortium of business peoples' association very publicly demanding that Congress address and meaningfully correct these important defects could not be ignored. Since the large businesses and industry organizations write their own legislation for Congress to submit as bills, it would be good to submit what you require with specificity as well. If you leave it to them, they won't give you what you want, if they ever would get around to it. A survey of members' priorities would be followed by a vote to sort out the highest priority amongst them and would be the way to find a starting point. Determine by democratic process the top three priorities. Once those are accomplished, take up the next important until the list is worked through.

We argue in favour of an experimental laboratory approach as a way of accelerating the creation, incubation and testing of new venture ideas by establishing a micro-ecosystem of aspiring entrepreneurs and others in a business labs environment. The goal is to create a mini idea supercollider where a microscopic “Medici Effect” can be achieved where aspiring entrepreneurs with different ideas, experience and disciplines meet in a spirit of open innovation with the sum of the whole much greater than the sum of each of the individual parts. The creation of an ecosystem for idea creation and rapid testing using business simulation tools can accelerate the creation, mobilization and diffusion stages of the knowledge life cycle in a knowledge driven entrepreneurship venture while de-risking potential ventures before significant capital is applied.
Martin Curley and Piero Formica

Our Business Model Abstract: We can improve lives by mobilizing the mentoring power by using public libraries to create a Library Progress Administration. The Library hub infrastructure has the basic facilities, services, and installations needed to create sustainable jobs by mobilizing entrepreneurial mentoring services. We seek underutilized learning space in community libraries to create ecological-entrepreneur job opportunities. By providing access to entrepreneur mentoring and by localizing the innovation process, we can create better communities. We will regenerate our local economy through growing entrepreneur startups. Entrepreneurs can provide the innovations needed to build clean-technology startup organizations. The opportunity is not to build the rare high-risk scaling organization but to quickly build innovative entrepreneurial startups. Startups will help solve ecological and employment problems that threaten our very existence.

Great to see finally people talking about entrepreneurship with a fine toothed comb. Too much simplistic ideological focus on tax rates, and monetary policy and the needs of the mere owners of money as the only important factors of production have crippled our economy and economic prospects for some time.

I am glad to hear someone at least finally talking about the human inputs that alone make possible turning ordinary money, favorable tax rates and interest rates into anything like a new business.

We've also got to get the unfair political advantages bought by entrenched going concerns who block capital formation around innovation that threatens their out of date business models too! This is major in the energy sector now, where unfair advantages distort IRR calculations for alternative energy, biggest one being the military subsidy taxpayers pay to oil and extractors all over the world to ensure their property rights in foreign hostile, but nevertheless cheap, labor countries, as well as transportation through pirate zones.

None of those real costs turn up in any pump price. Leaving them out therefore distorts IRR calc for kilowatt hour comparisons for new energies. These subsidies and low effective corporate income tax rates also explain the super normal economic rents enjoyed by what is basically a monopoly industry of oligopolies, oligarchs, and their attendant military servants, with no real competition in sight (Well done guys? You won this one. But, we're waking up and we're mad!).

That little problem never gets mentioned in these speeches in the Beltway. Surprise surprise. Don't tell me these people don't know the unintended or maybe fully intended consequences of the whole-system that feeds them.

Those consequences totally disadvantage new entrants in every sector of our economy that has now been overly concentrated into too few corporate shrinking brains' hands. IFIF.org, Businessweek, and Newsweek have all within the last year run articles about 10 yrs of market failure for capital to form around new innovations already funded on campuses by Federal basic R&D $$$ for decades.

While toothless anti-trust appointees by last President (and this President hasn't done anything to fix it either)have made a few people rich, they have stifled innovation to create new opportunity for everybody else. These rankings show that in painful detail.

I don't agree about Professors becoming entrepreneurs. They don't know how to run a business, and I've seen too many at important schools I won't mention piss away valuable money, time, and patents when keys were handed over to them. They don't know how to make the right hires, don't have the industry contacts they need to make deals, and little comes of it! The big licensing money for Federal R&D recipient universities has always come from Detroit and the military sector. Not from Professor run start-ups.

Let them and their students create patents, and let real business people build diverse teams that can convert ideas on paper (even patent paper) into products and sell them to paying customers. I agree that hard sciences can create patents, but even by choosing science, they self select the personal skills and attributes they will have for life, which are not the ones needed to build run and market a complete enterprise.

They are rarely sales people, rarely people people and most of their work is never validated by insight or market research about sellable products in the first place. For all but special high tech products bought by fellow geeks on the cool factor, start-up technologies have to go through a time consuming and costly iterative process lead by people with sales and marketing skills more than science. These people skills, listening skills, workplace knowledge, and conceptual skills are what is needed to figure out what exactly is the sellable product those patents can become, and how it is going to be sold into already entrenched markets. Read Amar Bhide "Venturesome Economy" about the many many many skillsets it takes up and down any enterprise to convert science into business. That conversion is the hard part, where there is a shortage of skills with the right chemistry, especially as our high schools and universities seem to be failing to create truly generative creative minds these days, as definitely was the case in the past. That is the athletic part. The elastic brain part. And that is the part where everybody screws up!

This is work most VCs don't even know how to oversee correctly, since the profile of VCs has changed significantly over the last 15 years to be less experienced operators, to more MBAs with just finance training.

And certainly BODs of established companies prove themselves to be disincentivized by Wall Street quarterly earnings seasons for getting involved in any of this kind of work. Read Clayton Christensen about how time and time again experienced executives at expensive companies ignore the signs and never get on the band wagon for new innovations until the shareholders money has whittled down to nothing! And worse for the wage earners involved!

There is so much to learn to make into more common knowledge, and so many myths to bust. But those myths are well protected by incumbents of both industrial and money nature who try desperately to keep newcomers out of the secrets!

Since 2000 we have passed a number of laws and regulations that are killing innovation in the US. The incredible innovation of the 90s was based on technology start-up companies built on intellectual capital, financial capital, and human capital. All three of the pillars have been under attack since 2000. Our patent laws have been weakened reducing the value of intellectual capital. Sarbanes Oxley has made it impossible to go public reducing financial capital for start-ups and the FASB rules on stock options have made it harder to attract human capital to start-ups.

Innovation plays such a critical role in entrepreneurship. Secretary Locke's comments regarding more investment in innovation and entrepreneurship are a step in the right direction.