The same is true of these 'innovation centers'. We have had for 40 years a small business bureau that let the average person wanting to start a business the funds to do so. It is what spurred the growth of employment, quality of life, and creation of larger regional businesses. The money went to the person with the dream, who could be anyone. Anyone can see that it is the lack of funding of this agency and by lack of banks lending to small business owners that we have the slow-down today.....THIS SLOWDOWN IS MANUFACTURED. CONSUMERS SPUR ECONOMIC GROWTH AND WE ARE ALL BEING PUSHED TO POVERTY! What these 'innovation centers do is give people already having connections to venture capital a platform for free market development. As every academic who writes against these models say, INNOVATORS ARE THE EXCEPTION ......THEY HAVE A GENIUS THAT SETS THEM ASIDE AND THEY ARE GOOD AT FINDING THEIR OWN OUTLETS....... PEOPLE CANNOT BE MADE INTO INNOVATORS AS THIS MODEL PRETENDS. The govenment is moving funds to these operations rather than the SBA. The same thing happened to 'enterprise zones' that would make small business-owners of people living in poor communities who would hire others in their communities......THAT IS A GOOD THING.....LUXURY COMMUNITIES PAID BY TAXPAYERS AREN'T NECESSARY.
What corporations are doing is trying to eliminate the long-standing small business association and replace small business with these technology centers advancing ideas of a limited group of connected people that will most likely go global, not remain local. THIS IS NOT A PEOPLE PROJECT, IT IS A CORPORATE PROFIT PROJECT. You see below that Obama and the Third Way Senate is eliminating the SBA by defunding it and funding these innovation centers. Below you see what will be O'Malley's Presidential campaign snippit......he has indeed made sure that lots of money is moving to these centers and that state universities are staffed with corporate MBAs. We see the next step being promoted by his friend, The Chamber of Commerce, suggesting 'commercialization' which means patenting university research for use by that start-up. Whereas the SBA created jobs locally, these start-ups will often head straight to the global market.
These are the stories CitizensOversight will be sharing all across the country these next few years, especially the Presidential primary states so the unions and progressives know whose corner O'Malley will stand.
State ranks first in innovation, entrepreneurship
Posted: 6:00 pm Sun, June 17, 2012 By Lizzy McLellan
Daily Record Business Writer
Maryland is the top state for innovation and entrepreneurship, according to recent rankings by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, however, commercialization of these ideas is still lacking. “Given the amount of research that occurs here … we haven’t been in the past living up to our full potential,” said Secretary of Business and Economic Development Christian ...
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Even as Obama shouts for the need to help small business owners, he is cutting SBA and letting large banks refuse to give loans. All while being head cheerleader for these innovation centers!
Obama Plans to Cut SBA Budget Almost in Half
The president's 2012 budget proposal slashes Small Business Administration funding by 45 percent, although the agency's 2010 total was significantly inflated because of stimulus spending.
By Janean Chun Posted 2/ 14 11 at 3:00 PM | AOL News
| Uncle Sam's Great Recession stimulus for small businesses may soon be over. The Small Business Administration faces a 45 percent decrease in funding, as part of President Obama's 2012 proposed budget released Monday.
The proposed SBA budget stands at $985 million for 2012 -- down from the $1.8 billion the SBA received in 2010, a total that was fueled in large part by $962 million in supplemental stimulus appropriations that were designed to help boost small-business loans. Those appropriations are no longer available for 2012.
Other areas slated for budget cuts include Small Business Development Centers, which provide support and mentoring to entrepreneurs, and administrative costs, including a $7 million drop in salaries and expenses.
The SBA isn't the only government department that will have to figure out how to do more with less in the 2012 budget. Overall, Obama's $3.73 trillion budget proposal makes substantial cuts to some domestic programs and freezes others, with the goal of slashing the federal deficit by $1.1 trillion over a decade.
In that context, small-business lending fares pretty well. The 2012 SBA budget allows for about $27 billion in loan guarantees, including $16.5 billion in 7(a) loan guarantees and $7.5 billion in guaranteed lending for commercial real estate development and heavy machinery purchases, as well as $1.1 billion in direct loans for disaster assistance. From fiscal 2007 to 2010, the annual amount of disaster loans for businesses and homeowners in federal disaster areas averaged $837 million.
To see the complete 2012 SBA budget proposal, click here.
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US Small Business Administration
Working On Your Behalf Advocacy The voice of small business on Capitol Hill since it was created in 1976, the Office of Advocacy works to protect, strengthen and represent the interests of the nation’s small businesses within the Federal Government.
Ombudsman If excessive fines, penalties, or unfair regulatory enforcement by federal agencies are problems for your small business, you have a voice in Washington, D.C., through SBA’s Office of the National Ombudsman.
Inspector General The Office of the Inspector General conducts audits, investigations and other reviews to deter and detect waste, fraud and abuse in SBA programs and operations and to promote agency efficiency and effectiveness.
SBA Programs Small business is America's most powerful engine of opportunity and economic growth. That's where SBA comes in. SBA offers a variety of programs and support services to help you navigate the issues you face with your initial applications, and resources to help after you open for business.
The Economist
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Making entrepreneurs of us all
Mr Immelt admits that tax and education reform, though essential, will take many years to bear fruit. He thinks a third set of policies, to promote innovation and entrepreneurship, is likely to produce faster results.
“Getting the innovation engine going again is essential to reducing the structural rate of unemployment,” says Mr Phelps, the economist, dismissing the idea that innovation might actually destroy jobs by making production more efficient. “Virtually all innovations require people to conceive new products, to develop a way to produce them, market them and evaluate them,” he adds. Empirical evidence suggests that innovation has expanded the number of jobs.
Research funded by the Kauffman Foundation shows that between 1980 and 2005 all net new private-sector jobs in America were created by companies less than five years old. “Big firms destroy jobs to become more productive. Small firms need people to find opportunities to scale. That is why they create jobs,” says Carl Schramm, the foundation’s president. In America about 700,000 new firms are started every year. Until 2005 they created an annual 3m jobs between them, but in the past few years the number of new jobs per start-up has fallen, says Mr Schramm, and the total is now around 2.3m.
The challenge is to raise that rate again, but government efforts to stimulate entrepreneurship have a poor track record. Steve Case, the founder of AOL and another member of the jobs council, thinks Congress could help by passing a bipartisan “entrepreneurship act”. This could break the current political logjam by separately pushing several measures that have been blocked by Washington’s battles over far bigger reforms. For example, it could include giving visas to foreign entrepreneurs on condition that they create jobs in America, which seems a no-brainer but has got nowhere because the country’s mood has turned against immigration for entirely separate reasons. Mr Bloomberg wants to go further by offering visas to foreigners who agree to live in a failing city such as Detroit for a minimum of seven years without claiming any federal, state or local welfare benefits. “Overnight you would fill Detroit with people who would fill it with new jobs,” he says.
Mr Case is also providing financial support for Startup America, an organisation that, among other things, wants to help people clone Silicon Valley in other parts of the country. That idea has been tried before in many parts of the world, but with little success. One reason seems to be that these efforts have generally relied on a single silver bullet, such as tax breaks from the government or small-business incubators set up by venture capitalists. But what makes Silicon Valley special is the way in which a lot of different things are mixed together to make the sum greater than the parts.
A venture called Research Triangle Park in North Carolina seems particularly promising because it has the same sort of talent, wealth and institutions (such as universities and big corporate research departments) as Silicon Valley, but until recently there has been no co-ordinated effort to put them together to produce a strategy for starting and expanding new businesses.
More broadly, Mr Case is calling on Mr Obama and business leaders to give entrepreneurship more of a push because, he thinks, “entrepreneurship is not as uniformly part of the American dynamic as you’d think. The United States is better than most places, but the assumption that entrepreneurship is in America’s DNA is not true.”
If America needs to work harder to encourage entrepreneurs, the rest of the world has to make even more of an effort. StartUp Britain, launched earlier this year, is trying to do much the same as Startup America. Edward Davey, a business minister in the British government, is preparing a comprehensive package of help for entrepreneurs that he calls “employment in a box”, which he says will “make it really, really easy to take on your first employee”.
The emerging markets have similar needs. “In China the biggest challenge in the next five years is job creation,” says Mr Ma of Alibaba. He has set himself the ambitious goal of creating 100m jobs by 2019, but says this depends on the Chinese government adopting a more positive attitude towards entrepreneurs, who do not have an easy life in his country. Small and medium-sized businesses face high raw-materials prices and rising labour costs, but miss out on the low electricity prices and tax advantages enjoyed by big firms. They also have trouble borrowing money. A recent survey found that 84% of the start-up businesses on Alibaba are looking for loans of up to $50,000—too small for most Chinese banks to bother with, says Mr Ma, who is lobbying the government for easier finance.
from the print edition | Special report