"In Ng’s story you can discern the main components of America’s success as an incubator of new things: a welcome mat for talented, ambitious immigrants. An education system that (when it is not teaching test-taking) values creativity. The availability of start-up capital. Patent laws that protect intellectual property. An infrastructure that gets things shipped and marketed. And, perhaps most important, a culture that preaches opportunity and celebrates the risk-taker, the pioneer. From the Wright Brothers taking flight, to Bill Bowerman of Nike using a waffle iron to revolutionize running shoes, to Steve Jobs and his beautiful machines, to Choon Ng, we worship the inventive spark.
The question is, can we keep it up?
The culture part, at least, seems to be alive and well. “Entrepreneur” is to the academic achiever of today what “doctor” and “lawyer” were to my generation. “It’s the cool thing,” said Bill Aulet, who runs a center for entrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I would say nationally we’re looking at 20 or 25 percent of the student population that wants to be entrepreneurs.”
But for all the pop-culture enthusiasm, there are signs that our innovative dynamism is diminishing. The pace of new business creation, on a per-capita basis, has been in a slow but steady decline since the mid-1980s, according to the Kauffman Foundation, which studies entrepreneurial trends. That suggests that other essentials of a thriving innovative economy have been neglected.
L'article au complet:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/18/opinion/keller-toy-story.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131118
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