Can Karen Mills pull it off?

SBA Administrator Karen Mills talks with NPR's Renee Montagne. It's good to hear all the recognition of the value and contribution of small businesses in creating jobs. Let's get on with it!

Listen here:

Direct Lending to Businesses

The New York Times reports on a small business owner's question posed recently to President Obama during a town hall meeting in Tampa, Florida. Steve Gordon's proposal was that if the government is to be involved in supporting loans to small businesses, why not lend directly to those small businesses? Obama's response was to explain that the SBA doesn't have the infrastructure in place to process and oversee direct loans; that local banks are better able to handle such loans more efficiently. The frustration of course is that even these local banks are still lending too little, too late.

Interestingly, this comes on the heels of the President's renewed pledge to do away with subsidies to support private lending to students, in favor of an expanded Direct Student Loan program. One difference perhaps is that the Direct Loan program already has in place the infrastructure to handle these loans. Regardless, there are still those who resist such a move toward reducing wasteful and inefficient government subsidies.

Is there any reason that the SBA and the Direct Student Loan programs couldn't team up to handle small business lending as well? With all the talk of increasing partnerships between universities and entrepreneurs, wouldn't such a pairing be an appropriate first step?

It is a valid question and worthwhile discussion to be had: what is the most efficient means for utilizing existing government revenues for the purpose of supporting and sustaining the development and growth of job-creating businesses?

Hidden Agenda in Supreme Court Decision?

No, I can't speak from any inside information, nor do I have the stomach to fathom or dissect the motivations of Supreme Court Justices. But the recent decision regarding campaign finance has a hidden impact that seems to be largely overlooked in the tumult of coverage:

Who has the most to gain from a greatly expanded and lucrative market for self-interested campaign ads?

I'll give you a hint: where will those ads appear? With all the widespread talk of trouble in the media world; with even Rupert Murdoch lambasting Google for republishing media content for free; newspapers dying; television advertising suffering...

Got the picture? Campaign ads provide a potential windfall for those advertising platforms currently suffering an immense reduction in revenues. The National Small Business Association implies as much in their reporting. Could the Supreme Court's ruling be influenced in part by the economic misery of traditional media? No telling. The results will likely speak for themselves!

Commerce Secretary Locke almost gets it

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Locke seems to have a sense that innovation is what drives an economy, that supporting entrepreneurship is key. Yet, the worldview he presents of where innovation comes from is deeply entrenched in the idea that smart ideas come from universities, and entrepreneurs' role is essentially limited to bringing smart university folks' ideas to market.

[Commerce Secretary Gary Locke Announces Plans for Forum on R&D Commercialization at Universities]

The problem that Secretary Locke seems to miss is that:

The university system is BROKEN! The rewards and incentives are not extant for the majority of the country's best and brightest innovators, who fall through the cracks of a broken university system!

There are simply not enough research faculty positions to employ the great bulk of innovative thinkers who are not hired for standard faculty positions because they're focused on researching new ideas that don't easily fit within the confines of traditional and change-averse disciplines, who are therefore erroneously judged to be less-qualified or less-desirable as teachers. Those who are granted tenure track positions are quite often bogged down with too many classes, too many students, and too many committee assignments to effectively teach and research.

If we really want to leverage the capabilities of our universities and entrepreneurs, we need to strengthen both! If we want a real stimulus to the innovation economy, we must:

• Provide the framework for universities to double their research faculty.
• Judge universities on the percentage of their doctoral graduates who are fully and appropriately employed upon graduation, and create incentives for those who are most successful in this regard.
• Provide the incentives for innovative thinkers to create, sustain, and grow their own research businesses (NEXT HINT: SBIR!)
• Enough with the dilly-dallying: let's remove the roadblocks to reauthorization; let's remove the hindrances and watering down of a truly cost-effective, job-creating program and get SBIR pushed ahead.
• Double the allocations (to 5%); keep award sizes within reason; retain the three-phase system; seed the ideas that drive the economy!

That's how to create a Research Entrepreneur economy! We want people who are equally passionate about research as about business. And we need to secure the environment where ideas thrive and are cultivated into proofs-of-concept; proofs are coaxed into prototypes; and prototypes are driven into the market.

Get on with it Washington!