OPINION
The Case for Entrepreneurs: Open Borders, Open Innovation
By Rohit K. Shukla, CEO, Larta Institute

There is little that we can say about the current economic environment about which pundits have not already pontificated ad nauseam (causing most of us nausea in the bargain).

As is almost always the case in our over-analyzed, overwrought society, each hysterical pronouncement builds off another, which then succeeds in begetting yet another gem of diminished wisdom but overreaching cleverness. There is just no point in trying to "penetrate the arcana of the modern Babylon," as Dickens wrote so memorably in David Copperfield. Instead, it is time, again, to count our blessings and consider the virtues and values of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs, and especially, the committed, passionate innovators who take an idea and relentlessly evangelize and navigate always dangerous and rocky ground, will reassert themselves in these distraught times. Bootstrapping for them has been a constant theme. Not for them the machinations of high finance. In recent years, as the world has shrunk, the best of them have sought to look across the globe to find talent and partners, and even ideas and enhancements, despite considerable obstacles. This is a trend that we should applaud, instead of bemoaning our supposed loss of competitiveness (and locking our doors, introducing legislative provisions that deny visas to high tech workers, providing disincentives to our innovators in their quest for widespread adoption and value). The drumbeat of pessimism about the lack of qualified people being trained in our nation's universities and institutions fails to grasp that innovators are not always, or even often, the originators. Instead, they take ideas and create opportunities that are often far-removed from the original idea. They do so in the context of a society that has always supported ingenuity, quirkiness and, yes, even failure. Instead of just focusing our attention on building research enterprises here, we should open the floodgates, let research and ideas that originate anywhere find a lasting place in our programs, with the necessary caveats of national security.

We have an abundance of innovators - those that Amar Bhide, in his fascinating book, The Venturesome Economy, describes as being able to effectively use products and technologies derived from scientific research. In the commercialization program which Larta Institute manages for the National Institutes of Health, we work with innovators who regularly trump the notion that the purity of an idea must be upheld at all costs. The best of them look to grow further afield, in areas not tied to their original research.

Despite Bhide's misgivings about subsidizing research, however, it is clear to those of us who spend time mentoring, advising, and assisting such innovators that they don't just spring from the ether. They often emerge from the wellspring of such research. While many of them may not have a good sense of where and how their innovations may be used, the very best of them will strive to push it out wherever they can, and our research programs should encourage this, not seek to stifle it through regulatory burdens on where and how this research may be conducted. They may never attract venture capital, as it has moved upstream in search of less risky deals, but they may discover the benefits of global reach through partnerships with innovators across the world. As scientific disciplines converge, opportunities for cross-cutting innovations will also abound. Developments in the life sciences create environmental innovations, developments in food and agricultural sciences influence alternative energy pursuits, and so on. Our work with emerging innovators funded by USDA shows that many of the fruits of research pay off in areas where the original innovation is tweaked and modified. They are hamstrung, however, by notions of national exclusivity, which prevent these ideas from being "cross fed" across the world. Bhide correctly identifies this exclusivity as being misdirected, because it fails to take into account the fact that cross-border flows are here to stay, and have led to a proliferation of innovation.

If we seek to punish the misdeeds of high finance in a time we perceive as an economic meltdown, by adopting a mission of protectionism, what we will likely do is to kill the goose (the entrepreneur) that lays the golden egg. We will succeed only in preventing competition for workable, innovative solutions, springing from the minds and through the passionate efforts of people anywhere and everywhere.

Instead, now is the time to bring the world closer, by allowing for and encouraging re-alignment of research and the exploitation of that research via cross-border partnerships, harmonization of rules, and providing incentives that will push the adoption of beneficial research to all corners of the globe, where all comers can "have at it". This, not more aid, will enable the development and growth of entrepreneurship around the globe, create more prosperity, more enterprises, more employment and more trade.

(The opinions expressed in this article are the author's, and his alone, and do not necessarily reflect the positions or opinions of Larta Institute).