Few of us are happy about the level of progress we have made in creating new jobs, new businesses and reaching the high road economic vision we all share – be it about manufacturing and job creation, small business entrepreneurship, clean energy market transformation, 21st century infrastructure, local economic development, or export expansion.
It’s important to note that the news is not all bad: a robust set of solutions and investments have already been deployed by the Obama Administration. In the short-run, the Recovery Act has done its job to keep the economy from entering a free-fall and the Administration’s unheralded set of long-term “new foundation” investments in education and workforce, broadband, clean energy and so forth are seeding new ideas and industries.
The next step is what this project focuses on – creating the right “middleware” to better connect the dots — linking short term and long term federal investment strategies, the public and private sectors, and innovative ideas from the top with the frontline realities of bottom-up and regional implementation.
At the core of these ideas is a simple paradigm shift – an emphasis on nurturing bottom-up change rather than top-down dictates. The reason: federal silo’ed programs and one-size-fits-all solutions don’t work as well anymore in meeting the complex challenges of the 21st century economic markets. Growth, job creation and shared prosperity lies in creating opportunities for entrepreneurs and new businesses to find financing, lifting up new clean economy markets, and building new networks to connect innovators, suppliers and customers across traditional geographies.
Backgrounder: Next Economy Partnership Project One Pager July 2011
Recent Work
Dan Carol: Going Local on Job Creation. August 16, 2011.
June Polling on Jobs and Energy Solutions
The Acceleration Agenda: Job Creation, Innovation and Economic Development in the 21st Century
Dan Carol and Morley Winograd: Reorganizing Beyond the Beltway. May 4, 2011.
Dan Carol: The Bottom Line on Bottom Up. February 14, 2011.
Dan Carol: Rediscovering the Obama Narrative. April 21, 2010.