Among many of the major innovations that characterize modern life — cars, computers and air conditioning, for instance — Robert Litan sees a common thread.
“They were all introduced in the marketplace by an entrepreneur, by a new firm,” Litan says. “We need an economy that generates these new firms.”
In a video released last month — one of several recent releases from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation‘s animated Sketchbook Series — Litan explores the conditions needed to foster the growth of such firms.
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Litan, the director of research at Bloomberg Government and the former vice president for research and policy at the Kansas City, Mo.-based Kauffman Foundation, draws from ideas discussed in “Better Capitalism,” a book he co-authored with Carl Schramm, a professor at Syracuse University and the former CEO of the Kauffman Foundation.
Litan boils his thoughts down to four areas of public policy that can help increase the number of high-growth firms in the United States:
- High-skilled immigration
- Improving access to capital for new firms
- Advancing the pace of commercialization of innovations at universities
- Regulatory reform
If we adopt favorable policies in those areas, Litan posits, we’ll all be better off. “The faster economies grow, the faster living standards grow,” he says. “It’s what’s given us a better life. We’ve inherited this tremendous progress; we want to be able to pass it on to the next generation.”
Litan concludes by saying entrepreneurs are exactly the people to whom we should entrust our economic future.
“If there’s one group of people in society that are optimistic, it’s entrepreneurs,” he says. “And we need a lot more of that optimism to lift all this doom and gloom that we have around us, because where other people see problems, entrepreneurs see opportunities.”
Credits: Screenshot and video from The Kauffman Foundation on YouTube.
