We are living in extraordinary times, where technology is allowing small teams of individuals to accomplish what were once only the province of governments. Empowered by smart phones, the internet, artificial intelligence, ubiquitous networks, cloud computing, robotics and digital manufacturing, small teams are building platforms and companies that are touching the lives of billions, and solving problems once solely the domain of the public sector.
Burt Rutan and a small team of 30 engineers built a spaceship able to fly twice into space within two weeks; the winners of the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X PRIZE quadrupled the rate of cleaning up oil spills on the ocean surface; an area where a trillion dollar industry had failed to make improvements in 20 years. Three co-founders of Kickstarter built a crowd funding platform that will raise $150 million by the end of 2012, providing more funding than the National Endowment for the Arts. The two co-founders of Kiva created a global lending platform that has made more than $330 million dollars in loans to 817,000 borrowers with little or no collateral and achieved a 99 percent repayment rate.
How we solve today's problems and who solves them are both changing in a dramatic fashion and this is a very good thing. We have a lot of challenges and one of them (the topic of this blog) is job creation in America. You know the stats: Over 20 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed; More than 50 percent of our recent college and high school grads fall into this category. At the same time we have 3 million jobs that aren't being filled because applicants don't have the proper training.
Who is going to solve this problem? Government? Perhaps, but frankly, I'd also like the smartest most passionate thinkers and entrepreneurs across our great nation all competing to beat this problem into submission. I'd love to have a lot of ideas tried in parallel with the hope of some true breakthroughs.
The challenge is that the day before something is truly a breakthrough it's a crazy idea. And crazy ideas are very risky to attempt. If governments try and fail, there's a congressional investigation. If a company fails, its stock price can take a hit and executive compensation follows next. One answer to this conundrum is incentive competitions. Put up a prize with an audacious goal, have lots of teams (large and small) attempt to solve it and only pay the winner in success.
Recently, an extraordinary organization called the Robin Hood Foundation raised $19 million to develop, launch and operate a series of Robin Hood X PRIZEs to combat poverty in New York, with the hope that what we learn in New York might be replicated in cities throughout the U.S. What prizes we develop and launch is yet to be determined. The goal is to aim at the root causes of poverty. Issues like education and literacy, reducing high school and college dropout rates, job skills training, and many others.
This blog is a request to crowd-source ideas for a series of Jobs X PRIZEs. My question to you is the following: What should the competition look like? What are the rules?
A great incentive competition (what we call an X PRIZE) has rules that are clear, measurable and objective.
Given these as examples, what would your rules be for an X PRIZE intended to incentivize new ways to create, finance and find Jobs in America?
Here's a quick primer in prize creation: In designing an X PRIZE, you'll need to answer the following seven questions.
If you have ideas for the rules around a Jobs X PRIZE, we would LOVE to have you submit them here. This is a special Prize Submission form created jointly by the Huffington Post and X PRIZE to get your ideas. The best ideas may be used for a future set of Jobs X PRIZEs.
To read more from the X PRIZE Foundation on The Huffington Post, visit their blog archive here.
Follow Peter Diamandis on Twitter: www.twitter.com/PeterDiamandis
1. Government NEVER creates jobs, they may provide temporary incentives or outright pay for jobs, but both actions are not sustainable - they're temporary.
2. Entrepreneurs and businesses do not create jobs either, they respond to the market and competition in an effort to satisfy an existing need or desire.
3. Only DEMAND can create jobs. Demand can be satisfied by solving a problem or creating a product that supplies and satisfies that demand.
If we want to create real, sustainable jobs, we must look for unmet demand and create economically viable solutions. For instance, there is a tremendous demand for clean AFFORDABLE energy and we have not met that demand. We have subsidized incremental "alternatives" that haven't even kept up with increased demand. $500 billion was spent in the last 5 years for wind and solar schemes, yet they have made no difference. Clean, affordable energy still needs a Solution.
Agriculture is another big one. Traditional methods of crop and livestock production are both inefficient and unreliable. The ability to produce crops and livestock efficiently and with a degree of certainty is another demand that needs a solution.
Targeting both electricity generation and agriculture would solve or coming water shortage - these two industries consume 80% of our fresh water.
My work is here: http://www.solutioneur.com
I'm looking forward to the ideas submitted.
I am for jubilee debt forgiveness, when can I get my check.
Retail sales fell for a third straight month in June as demand slumped for everything from cars and electronics to building materials, a sign the economic recovery is flagging.
Retail sales slipped 0.5 percent, the Commerce Department said on Monday.
It was the first time sales had dropped in three consecutive months since late 2008, when the economy was still mired in a deep recession. Analysts polled by Reuters had expected retail sales to rise 0.2 percent.
The report adds to a spate of weak economic data that is raising pressure on President Barack Obama ahead of his November reelection bid. Republican challenger Mitt Romney is focusing his campaign on the weak economy that has plagued Obama's presidency.
...Job creation in the United States has slowed dramatically in the last few months, and recently the country's factory sector also showed signs of contraction.
The retail data is particularly worrisome because it suggests consumer spending, which drives about two-thirds of the economy, is also sagging.
Sales of motor vehicles and parts dropped 0.6 percent last month. Receipts at electronics and appliance stores declined 0.8 percent. Sales of building materials slipped 1.6 percent, while receipts as gasoline stations dropped 1.8 percent.
Excluding autos, sales fell 0.4 percent.
A so-called core measure of retail sales, which excludes autos, gasoline and building materials, dropped 0.1 percent.
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AND -- those jobs you promised obama, where are they?
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1.) Select 5 of the poorest towns in the USA where people are hurting the most for jobs.
2.) Invite 3 Startup Entrepreneurs who will be given $3 million each to create long-term (> 4 years) jobs in one town. So there will be 15 Startup Entrepreneurs all in all.
3.) Software companies are excluded from this contest. Preference goes to real 'product' Startup Entrepreneurs whose products must be sourced anywhere in the USA and, manufactured and assembled completely in that town. The products must be true innovations that can and will be sold worldwide. The Startup Entrepreneur's companies must be less than a year old to join.
4.) The Startup Entrepreneurs that create the most number of long-term jobs after 3 years (sustained by actual sales) out of all 5 towns in each state wins. Each winning Startup Entrepreneur will receive $5 million cash reward, but $3 million of that amount must be used to start creating jobs in another poor town in a different state.
5.) Startup Entrepreneurs can get assistance from any U.S. company, US government entity, and can seek additional venture funding or angel investment without limit. Taking out loans is prohibited however.
6.) Startup Entrepreneurs can spread manufacturing to several towns in the same state if necessary
They are created by 1. competition, 2. government investment, 3. regulations and taxes that force the distribution to an ever wider portion of the population thus generating demand.
Competition - every time an industry consolidates it cuts workers, and it slows salary growth, and it weakens labors negotiation position as there is less competition for workers.
Government investment is critical to a large growing economy. Government investment provided either the capital or the actual products for almost all modern industries - the space programs brought about communication products, all kinds of material advances, and the computer industry. The oil industry is even today based on the largess of the public in selling leases to the oil industry at a hundredth of their value and lets not for get the subsidies for the oil and mining industries. The banking industry would not exist at all if the Fed and the people had not saved it in 2008/09. etc.
Regulations and taxes - without regulations that force business to negotiate with their employees - they don't. And history has proven this principle over and over. Without overtime laws, business will work laborers for as many hours as they can and pay them nothing - this has a direct relationship to the number of jobs. If a company can work employees 60 or 80 hours a week and pay no overtime, then they can do with half as many workers. If taxes are not used to force corporations to redistribute the profits of the company in the form of wages, benefits, pensions, etc. then they won't. And as the laws regulating this area and taxes have declined over the last 40 years - those benefits and wages have declined like clockwork.
You leave out one of the RW favorite canards that we can boost employment by removing the minimum wage. Well so would bringing back slavery.
GWBush left us with an "every man for himself" mentality. Never worked, never will.