inclusive competitiveness Archives - Digipreneurship University is a fast track collaborative learning platform.

How Best To Encourage Black ‘Teenpreneurs’

Jan 24, 2014 | coaching

The difference is that STEM education is the entry point. Science, technology, engineering and math is the entry point for entrepreneurs that want to participate and actually compete in a tech-driven economy. And without that type of background and without having the access points to the networks that you largely see at Harvard and MIT and Stanford and many of the other research institutions and institutions of innovation, we’re not in those circles.

We don’t have the academic background. We don’t have an understanding. We don’t have generational knowledge of the type of entrepreneurship that exists today. We don’t have the generational wealth that is passed down that provides the boot-strapping needs of entrepreneurs. We’re missing a number of the basic resources that empower entrepreneurs to compete in today’s society.

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America’s Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow

Jan 15, 2014 | coaching, innovation

written by Mike Green, @Futurists in Tech

They are competitive, creative, innovative, resilient and courageous. If those sound like core characteristics of successful entrepreneurs, they are, and we need to build on them.

It’s no secret that America’s black boys are considered the most difficult to educate, recalcitrant, truant, lost, confused, angry and dangerous demographic in the public-education system. The “school-to-prison pipeline” is an apt description for the millions of black male teenagers who must navigate the tumultuous channels of failed high poverty schools and communities without a committed, knowledgeable adult male to guide them through the daily dilemmas and risk assessments that far too often force them to choose between life and death. This horrific paradigm persists primarily because educators, policymakers, investors and CEOs have also failed at math and risk assessment.

One of the solutions to America’s current crisis of flailing economics in its metro regions and flagging global economic competitiveness lies in the potential of one of the nation’s most promising assets: black boys. America has seen consistent resiliency and success from black males in each generation, despite centuries of degradation and deliberate institutional hostility. In today’s knowledge-based, tech-driven, globally competitive innovation economy, the key to discovering a solution to America’s economic woes requires a different lens through which leaders view investing in black boys. That lens is math.

The nation’s highest growth in entrepreneurship from 2002 to 2007 was among black Americans: 60 percent, more than three times the national average during the same period, resulting in the creation of 1.9 million black-owned businesses.

Saving America’s black boys, by investing in their innovative competitive intelligence through policies of inclusive competitiveness, would yield a future bumper crop of American innovators prepared to compete in a globally competitive, tech-based workforce and to become high-growth, job-creating entrepreneurs. Investing in saving America’s most disconnected demographic is an investment in saving America.

What is Inclusive Competitiveness?

Jan 9, 2014 | innovation, partnerships

New job creators also play an outsized role in the development of innovative new products and services that can revolutionize industries and transform entire sectors of our economy. Research shows that innovation has been responsible for approximately two-thirds of our country’s economic growth since World War II.

Empowering these businesses, and embracing an inclusive view of entrepreneurship, is essential to our long-term economic growth and global competitiveness. We need more people across the country to start the types of businesses that make our economy more competitive and our industries more innovative. That’s why we’re making strategic investments that focus on increasing access to capital for high-growth businesses, strengthening entrepreneurial skills training and building regional entrepreneurial ecosystems (through clusters and growth accelerators).

We must also make the necessary investments in STEM fields so that we can have a workforce with the skills and expertise to compete and win in an increasingly competitive global economy.

By making these investments, we will build on our nation’s economic recovery, inject new energy and momentum into our economy, bolster new business starts and leverage the greatest driver of innovation and job creation in the world—the American entrepreneur.

— an excerpt from Karen Mills, Forbes

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America21 defines The Innovation Economy as the period in the late 20th and early 21st centuries marked by radical socioeconomic changes brought about by the following:

[alert color=yellow align=center] Further globalization of commerce ; democratization of information ; exponential growth of entrepreneurship, and ; acceleration of new knowledge creation [/alert]

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Inclusive Competitiveness is girded by three pillars:
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Education, specifically STEM (science, technology, engineering, math)
Entrepreneurship, especially high-growth
Access to Capital, capital formation and investment (including equity, debt and credit)

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How Best To Encourage Black ‘Teenpreneurs’

America’s Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow

What is Inclusive Competitiveness?

Global Technology Education Elevates Voices of Young Farmers

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