The book The Entrepreneurial Imperative by Carl J. Schramm is subtitled "How America's Economic Miracle Will Reshape the World and Change Your Life".

This is not a book on entrepreneurship, but rather a book on why entrepreneurship (practice of, promotion of, as foreign policy) is important to the a public policy for future USA.

Right from page one the thesis is presented directly:

For the United States to survive and continue its economic and political leadership in the world, we must see entrepreneurship as our central comparative advantage. Nothing else can give us the necessary leverage to remain an economic superpower. Nothing else will allow us to continue to enjoy our standard of living. We either support and nature increasingly entrepreneurial activities in all aspect of our society and around the globe or run the very real risk that we will become progressively irrelevant on the world stage and suffer economically at home.

In short, entrepreneurship in business and universities; in our approach to both government and foreign policy; and in our personal lives is the only answer if we hope to continue to thrive.

Aren't there other solutions?

No.

The author offers these definitions:

* Entrepreneurship is the process in which one or more people undertake economic risk to create a new organization that will exploit a new technology or innovative process the generates value to others.
* The Entrepreneur is one who undertakes personal economic risk to create a new organization that will exploit a new technology or innovative process the generates value to others.

Those definitions work for me well enough for me.

I'd like to see what candidates for President in 2008 are going to talk this up - if any.

For foreign policy, this means promoting in entrepreneurial capitalism over democracy promoting (or even business/globalization in general) .

For domestic policy, this means creating environments were entrepreneurship is rewarded, and risks are reduced (less risk = more entrepreneurial activity). What might this mean: National systems of employer independent pension and health insurance systems (not gov run), and new financing and legal mechanisms.

For schools and universities, this means entrepreneurship should be taught and practiced.

This seems like an important book to me. At under 200 pages it is a quick read.

I enjoyed Carl's book. He provides fresh insight among the many economists that all think a like. Carl's insights gave me a fresh perspective on America and what is driving the new economy. I think the book is a required read for anyone managing their own investments, or thinking of a career change.

As a former liberal arts major who picked up my business skills on the fly, I agree with Carl Schramm's contention that entrepreneurial skill development should become a mandatory part of the basic education here in the U.S. While it would have been nice to have learned more about business basics during high school, I think it was too easy to bypass the real world until college was in the rear-view mirror. Now, with the benefit of experience, I wish that my academic experience would have contained some rooting in the entrepreneurial spirit put forward in this book.

With ten years of business ownership now under my belt, I can see the mis-steps that could have been avoided with just a few basic teachings. While I always thought I had "the" idea, I only recently grasped how much earlier my current success could have come if I had leveraged the benefits of others' experiences. This book echoes my personal experience that the power of ideas is substantially strengthened by a collaborative network of people and institutions focused on creating something more. I now see that providing a benefit to a larger group also leads to benefits for me. From that point-of-view, I think Carl Schramm's positions are headed in the right direction.

I was taken with Mr. Schramm's challenge to consider how every individual has a part to play in maintaining America's economic strength. While all of us will have different ideas about how to sustain a strong economy, it seems to me that entrepreneurial activities are keeping the innovation engine flowing while politicians and more entrenched institutional structures struggle to keep up.

I look at my own experience in a large company and see that our business could be more strategic and objective-oriented. If we are open to being more entrepreneurial, as Mr. Schramm suggests, smart and fresh ideas for growth and improvement could come from anywhere: our co-workers, our customers, our partners, our vendors.

I see the concept of American entrepreneurialism advocated here as more about providing empowerment to people to shape their own destinies. Looking around the world right now, I'd hope that anyone would agree that we could all use some of that.

I was one of the first people to rush out and get this book. I assumed that a book written by the President of the Kauffman Foundation would have important insights into entrepreneurship. Boy, was I wrong!

The book is riddled with inaccuracies. For example, it says that only Israel is a more entrepreneurial country than the United States when the Kauffman Foundation's own research shows only a middling rate of entrepreneurship in the U.S., below that of Peru and Uganda of all places.

In another example, the book says that the current period is the most entrepreneurial in U.S. history, when, in fact, rates of entrepreneurship in the U.S. have been declining for decades.

But it is not just the facts that are a problem. The book's arguments are flawed too. The idea that U.S. foreign policy should focus on entrepreneurship smacks of the 1950s argument that "what's good for General Motors is good for the country". That seems naive, at best.

Similarly, the book is critical of US technology transfer operations. However, we would be hard pressed to improve a system that gave us a company like Google. Dr. Schramm should read the history of Stanford's involvement with Google before he criticize American universities' technology transfer operations.

Finally, the tone of the book is grating. It is both a polemic for entrepreneurship and a PR job for the Kauffman Foundation. Had I wanted that, I could have saved my money and read the materials that the Foundation gives away for free.