The Entrepreneurship Crisis: The Urgent Need for a Comprehensive Innovation Policy

Abstract:     
More than small business ownership, entrepreneurship means innovation. The world’s leading corporations endlessly hunger for innovation to sustain and grow their businesses in global competitive markets. Much of that innovation originates in clever new businesses and tech start-ups. In the United States, we have a poor track record of sustaining those start-ups, keeping them alive and growing and their innovations protected. As a result, major innovation consumers like Hewlett-Packard Company, Proctor & Gamble, and many more lose out on opportunities to bring start-up innovations on board and commercialize them. Tech start-ups fail at an alarming rate, wasting their intellectual assets and bankrupting their so desperately needed innovators. As a result, American business suffers the loss of innovations vital to its competiveness and the American economy and employment suffer.

Policymakers need to wake up to the devastating wastage of innovation and develop a cohesive, comprehensive plan to fuel innovation, support technology start-ups, and facilitate the transfer of these innovations to the major corporations that can commercialize them and bring home high-paying American jobs in the innovation economy.

Keywords: entrepreneurship, law, economics, innovation, commercialization, entrepreneur, intellectual property, economic development, innovation policy, economic policy

JEL Classification: K00, M13, O3, K2

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