Читать книгу The New Builders - Seth Levine - Страница 25

In our economy many, if not most, innovative breakthroughs are born in small businesses. A few big businesses have defied the odds to remain innovative over time, but almost by definition, big companies work on incremental innovations – an effort to build upon the value of what they already own and often to protect the economic value of past innovations.¹⁵ The importance of small businesses in the process of innovation is one of the reasons that American government and media have showered so much time and attention on Silicon Valley and the technology industry. For a while, the Valley appeared to have a lock on the process of innovation, spawning thousands of small businesses – renamed startups in the high‐tech world. With a purpose‐made system of finance (venture capital, private equity, and the like), Silicon Valley has specialized in killing the startups that don't have fast‐growth potential and nurturing the ones that do into big companies – sometimes very, very big companies.

But like our dynamic economy, our much‐vaunted engine of innovation is showing signs of slowing down. Today, there are fewer entrepreneurs picking up the baton. We have a much less efficient system for funding ideas and companies because most of our systems of finance remain focused on a particular kind of new business founder: White males starting software or internet businesses. The barriers to women and people of color, as well as those from the lower rungs of our socioeconomic ladder, in particular, remain high, whether they are starting a technology company with the goal of scaling quickly or a business with different, yet equally important, goals. Additionally, class (perhaps better defined as caste) and age are also limiters of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial vitality in the United States. In the long game of becoming an innovator/entrepreneur, almost the only people who succeed are those who are either born into privilege, or those who are so good at what they do, and so passionate about it that they are able to overcome the systemic barriers stacked against them.