White House Announces Steps to Support Entrepreneurs

The Obama administration has announced a series of efforts to promote successful entrepreneurship in the United States and around the world. The steps include the Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship, a group of successful American businesspeople who have committed to sharing their time, energy, ideas and experience to help develop the next generation of entrepreneurs. The administration also intends to attract the best and the brightest by publishing proposed rules intended to make the United States more attractive to foreign entrepreneurs.

Additionally, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are collaborating to empower entrepreneurial scientists and address the critical gap between fundamental research and the development of a commercial entity, in part through Small Business Innovation Research funding and a pilot effort tailored for biomedical technologies. Another effort focuses on energizing entrepreneurs to help end extreme poverty through the U.S. Agency for International Development’s U.S. Global Development Lab. The lab will empower a global network of individuals to help create, solve and scale innovative solutions to global challenges by applying rigorous scientific, business, research and technological expertise. In the next five years, scientists and technology experts at the lab will endeavor to create a new global marketplace of innovations and take them to scale to reach more than 200 million people worldwide.

Furthermore, this fall the State Department will host TechCamps for women in El Salvador, Colombia and Argentina. These camps will bring together hundreds of women across the region over the course of the year and provide them training to address key challenges in business formation, from financing to marketing. The State Department also will launch two new exchange programs for entrepreneurs in the Western hemisphere.