Startup America: A Campaign To Celebrate, Inspire And Accelerate Entrepreneurship
Note from the editor: This is a guest post from Aneesh Chopra, United States Chief Technology Officer. — During last week's State of the Union address, President Obama challenged the Nation to out-educate …
Context & Ripple Effects
Startup America is the public face of an entrepreneurship push the Obama Administration has been assembling since 2009, when it created an office specifically to boost entrepreneurs and named Virginia technology secretary Aneesh Chopra as US CTO over more obvious Silicon Valley picks. What changed this week is the framing: rather than a bureaucratic office announcement, the White House packaged the effort as a campaign and pitched it directly to the startup community through a guest post on TechCrunch.
The vehicle is President Obama's State of the Union challenge to out-educate and out-innovate competitors, which gives the campaign a competitiveness rationale rather than a small-business one. That positioning matters because it ties federal entrepreneurship policy to the administration's broader innovation agenda instead of leaving it with conventional economic-development agencies.
First-order effects
- Chopra, writing as US CTO, is making the case for the campaign straight to founders and investors on TechCrunch, signaling that the White House wants the startup ecosystem as an audience and participant rather than just a beneficiary of federal programs.
Second-order effects
- The campaign's credibility with the startup community will rest on whether private companies commit real resources behind the federal banner, since a celebrate-and-inspire message alone competes poorly with actual capital and services.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, entrepreneurship stops being a niche small-business portfolio and becomes a standing pillar of national competitiveness policy, with the CTO's office as the connective tissue between the White House and the tech industry.
The trend: The Obama Administration is institutionalizing entrepreneurship support as a competitiveness strategy, moving from creating dedicated offices in 2009 to campaigning for startup culture as national economic policy.