Bill Clinton often says that there's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by what's right with America. Even in tough times, the U.S. has enormous assets. Yet, sometimes our brainpower, innovations, business and human capital are underutilized when they remain frozen in silos, disconnected from one another. Regions with lower unemployment and greater growth prospects break the ice by finding the connections between innovation, collaboration, and education -- a flow of resources to create, attract, and grow jobs.
For example, Milwaukee is attracting fame and jobs as one of three global water hubs. Starting just before the financial crisis, business and civic leaders identified water as a theme linking older manufacturers (plumbing supplies, controls), local food entrepreneurs, and scientists at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Subsequent investments grew their strengths. UWM built the nation's first graduate school of Freshwater Sciences. Labs are linked to business incubators and industries of the future. Startup companies see water opportunities; Sweet Water Organics grows perch and tilapia along with salad greens (a process called acquaponics) in an abandoned factory. This is spawning (pun intended) an industry providing healthy snacks to public school kids and science curricula to teachers.
The keys to breaking the ice:
Innovate to build enterprises.
Getting ideas out of the ivory tower and into enterprises requires both excellence in particular fields and collaborations to move innovations quickly. In Albany, the state university's nanoscience expertise has attracted a consortium of semiconductor companies working on collaborative research, bringing facilities and jobs to the area, and encouraging students to start related enterprises.
Perhaps we should measure colleges by not only the jobs their graduates get but also the jobs their graduates create. Rather than leave entrepreneurship to stealth all-nighters by the next Bill Gates, Michael Dell, or Mark Zuckerberg (who dropped out), new programs make it legit. In its first two years alone, University of Miami's LaunchPad, since emulated elsewhere, attracted 1,000 students and resulted in 45 new businesses. In general, according to a University of Michigan study, ventures nurtured in university-based incubators have an average five-year survival rate of 75%, much higher than the recent national average of 47%, and create jobs that tend to remain in the host region.
Connect the chains.
Once enterprises start, they need customers. Becoming a corporate supplier can produce significant growth for companies. About 70% of respondents to a Center for an Urban Future survey who became a supplier to a large company grew jobs by an average of two-and-a-half times by two years after the relationship began. Besides direct purchasing, big companies that invest in promising startups enhance their growth through mentoring and introductions to other customers, including internationally. The big companies can get first dibs on innovative ideas and better U.S. suppliers, helping bring jobs back to the U.S.
But access for small companies is difficult. To facilitate, IBM (a company to which I consult) created Supplier Connection, a Web portal resembling a universal college application. Several dozen big companies, representing over $160 billion in spending, are open to thousands of small and mid-sized businesses with the help of the SBA.
Verizon's Innovation Center in Waltham, Massachusetts, hosts about 80 other companies to develop industry-transformation projects running on 4G LTE networks -- taking technology out of the phone and into cars, bicycles, or refrigerators -- and sometimes links big and small, such as the "connected home" model that involved Hitachi, LG, and a seven-person startup called 4-Home.
Examples like these can be the basis for a national campaign to encourage big companies to help small businesses grow.
Educate for jobs.
An estimated one-third of U.S. unemployment is due to a mismatch between skills and available jobs. This is particularly true for so-called middle skill jobs, that require more than a high school diploma but less than a college degree. Many are well-paying occupations such as software engineering, advanced manufacturing, or medical technicians that support growth industries.
Community colleges, the source of such training, have been weak links, with high dropout rates (in Chicago, under 10% finish the two years of post-secondary education within six years). But when connected to employers and job skills, performance improves. Michigan's No Worker Left Behind program guarantees two years of free tuition toward an associate's degree and works closely with industry; in its first evaluation, 72% of 62,000 participants had found a new job or retained the current one.
In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, over half of those under 22 pursue an apprenticeship to learn a skilled trade; the U.S. number is under 4%. But in South Carolina, a small employer tax incentive of $1,000 per apprentice is adding to the stock and helping make the state the "Akron of America" as the new tire manufacturing capital.
Let's redefine "vocational education" as an attractive pathway to jobs of the future. A promising model is the new six-year high school in New York City, P-Tech (Pathways in Technology Early College High School), a partnership between the public schools, community college, and IBM, which provides mentors from the beginning and a promise of a job interview upon completing grade 14 with an associate's degree. (New York is adding five more, and Chicago is starting its own with a range of technology companies.)
National service programs are also a way to build links to work. They create direct jobs while teaching useful skills. YouthBuild turns at-risk youth into construction workers and green building experts. City Year (on whose board I serve) provides "near-peer" corps members to work in schools with dropout prone youth; many corps members go on to become teachers. Citizen Schools offers unpaid apprenticeships to middle school students, connecting them with the world of work and raising their aspirations.
Breaking the ice requires leaders in a region to work together to reinforce links across silos and sectors. If one part of the ecosystem dries up, it hurts the rest. To keep America strong and Americans working, opportunity must flow to everyone.
Follow Rosabeth Moss Kanter on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RosabethKanter
Gregory Floyd: We Intensify Our Battle Cry With Each Setback
America's economic problems stem from our inability to solve major problems. Too much of innovation-speak is about making something a little better, not fixing it. Job creation only comes from "demand." Any suggestion to the contrary misses the objective - employing people to do something useful. In this regard, government programs have failed miserably. Incentives create false hope by providing enough money to rent a job or prevent a job from being eliminated. It's temporary.
I agree with you we should focus on new ideas, but what kind of ideas? We have a long history of ignoring (and only servicing) many of our most important problems - clean, affordable energy, new schools/education systems, reliable and affordable agriculture, attainable urban living and even more efficient/effective charitable giving. Solving these problems, which all have significant and measurable demand will create jobs. Millions of jobs.
The latest government Plan for jobs "hopes" to create 1 million jobs in the next 3 years at a cost of $500 billion - that's $500,000 per new job. This is completely insignificant and incredibly expensive. As many as 30 million people seek jobs.
If we focus on demand and economically-viable solutions we can create millions of jobs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xj3Zc-SF0YE&feature=g-upl
Http://www.solutioneur.com
The solutions are available, but no one wants them.
The facts no one wants to read.
So, we wind up on public assistance sitting in classes with trainers who cannot handle that we earned triple their salary once and are more educated than them or have no criminal records and have an excellent command of the American English language. Then we're subjected to working for free under the WEP(Worker Experience Program)designed for people who have no experience in cleaning parks, public toilets, subways, etc. This the reality of what we live.
We don't want handouts we want jobs or financing for starting our own companies. Sorry but the corporations, the job cremators, are enjoying too much high unemployment working in their favor and it's about time the citizenry repeat the Boston Tea Party (not the Koch Bros tea party) and start boycotting the corporations that insert themselves in politics and our personal lives where they don't belong.
You want, you want, you want. Its all about YOU. Since, you are not getting what YOU want, you are playing the blame game.
What can you do for business, the world, anyone?
The structure of the economy is changing, ever more rapidly. People have to adapt/change with it or be left behind.
Nobody owes you anything.
The facts no one wants to read.
The fact that free trade requires us to borrow trillions to pay the bills just proves that free trade is unsustainable and does NOT work. Ending normalized trade with slave labor communist China is the first thing we need to do. Then end all work visas and end all student visas. We have all the people we need here in the US. Immigration should be cut in half too until unemployment falls below 4%.
Innovation? Are households sitting on piles of money they're not spending because the things to buy are too old-fashioned and boring? No! Therefore, why would innovation trigger consumer purchases? Besides, innovation basically replaces other things that people already work on. The creation of a new product creates employment but reduces it in the production of the product it replaces.
Education? It's simply not true that a third of our unemployment (about 5,000,000 people) is caused by skills mismatch. If it were true, employers would be training workers and salaries would be rising in those fields. But neither is happening.
The reason unemployment is high is because employers don't need employees, and they don't need employees because business is down, and business is down because people aren't buying stuff, and people aren't buying stuff because they have no money. People have reached the end of their buying power. Americans are already spending all their money, and unlike before, they can no longer spend what they don't have.
Poverty is rising in the US. Infant mortality is also on the rise in the US. The rich are going very well because they have offshored so much of the US's technology to communist China. To keep the system going our government has borrowed trillions. But its a completely unsustainable system. Without borrowing our free trade global economy would collapse. That alone tells you that free trade is unsustainable.
Until we wrap our heads around that we will continue to try one "fix" after another... and people will suffer... because we will not cooperate with one another.
Society's wealth is created and expanded by INVENTIVE and ADDED-ON manfuacturing sectors needing mental and physically hard-skills that Americans, in centuries gone-by, had excelled. In today's economy major players are aero-space, auto, high-tech, computer tech, agriculture and energy sectors.
The "PAPER (transaction) ECONOMY" (that business schools tout) adds little to expand over-all productivity considering its high finance, legal, accounting and adminstrative costs. Many of these layers of public and private bureaucracies are a waste and a drain of societies's wealth and assets.
The increasing "SERVICE" and "HEALTHCARE" and "ENTERTAINMENT" economy adds quality but does not add value to the economy; except that they keep a lot of people employed. These type of economic activity circulates money without significantly contributing to societies' wealth.
Time has arrived that we separate productive economy (like manufactuÂring and those listed above) from non-producÂtive economy (tourism, restaurantÂ, entertainmÂent, finance etc) that merely services consumers without making consumers significanÂtly expand / contribute to a productive economy.
This is the difference between the US economic productiviÂties of the 18th, 19th, 20th century and that of the 21st century.
It is also the difference in the economic productiviÂty of growing economies of Northern Europe and stagnating economies of Southern Europe; which are currently in fiscal crises.
Military economy of a country, while needed, should be classified as non-productive economy. Currently there are 2 milion vacancies for those with the right technical skill sets.
During the 19th century the US was the MOST protectionist nation on Earth. That is how we rose to power.
Neo-classical economists believe we can tweak the markets into growth or encourage animal spirits all this while the nation continues to deleverage and housing prices fall. It's funny when someone's belief system fails them, but continuing to follow the same economic medicine year after year when it only leads to stagnant wages and little growth borders on insanity. We need a demand driven growth strategy, not a trickle down austerity policy.
We need economic Justice built on prove economic solutions, not the ones proposed by those resoponsible for our crisis. Suppor Rocky Anderson and his reform revolution.
But:
We ourselves criminally manipulated the banking system.
We ourselves manipulated Wall Street with Hedge Funds, Insider trading and lax enforcement.
We speculated on the market; creating bubbles, for last 2 decades.
We ourselves manipulated home-building and related industries causing the boom and bust.
And:
We ourselves are mismanaging our school and college education system.
We are mismanaging health-care delivery, which could be an international industry.
We are mismanaging energy management which could be an international industry.
We are mismanaging environmental pollution which could be an international industry.
We ourselves are mismanaging our and the world's monetary debt.
We ourselves are mismanaging world peace.
You must work for the corporate communist because you are repeating their talking point.
Perhaps you are simply unaware of what is public record: 12 at or near minimum (non-living) wage positions. These 'jobs' include the owners, who were taking pay while they still owed back wages to former employees, and people who were "re-hired" (although they never left) at wages much lower than what they were making before SWO misled the Milwaukee city council into giving them $250,000 to create these jobs. Just weeks before the city awarded the funds, half of SWO's staff left knowing that the company was ~$million in debt. These former employees were owed thousands in back pay, and were no longer able to stomach the environmental disregard of those in charge.
Fast forward to a year later, when these bogus jobs met the requirements to have the loan forgiven by producing yet another show of smoke and mirrors.
Please research before you write... it's all in the news:
Should Tax Dollars Have Been Given to Sweet Water?:
http://www.jsonline.com/business/some-souring-on-sweet-waters-city-financing-deal-f64rugb-146527625.html
Politician Claims "100's of Jobs Created". City Documents Show Otherwise:
http://bloggingblue.com/2012/03/29/some-questions-about-sweet-water-organics/
What's Buried at Sweet Water Organics?:
http://bloggingblue.com/2012/04/03/two-more-questions-about-sweet-water-organics/
Images of buried tanks:
http://bloggingblue.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Outdoor-InGround-Tanks-Buried-at-SWO.pdf
In Sacramento the three key goals of the state government towards business seems to be tax, regulate and demonize - and the attitude towards our students isn't much better.
The high drop out rates in high schools are often due to Draconian policies such as forcing all students - regardless of their career paths or abilities - to pass algebra and other college prep classes; classes that far too often causes them to drop out.
And the vast sums of money wasted force feeding students classes they will fail - and they will never need in the real world - could easily fund a wide variety of vocational programs - or help set up the types of apprentice programs we need. Unfortunately, though, the California Teacher's Association will first have to be reformed from within by its teacher members before any meaningful reforms regarding education and the state's attitude towards business can take place.