Obama should launch his own moon shot. What the country needs most now is not more government stimulus, but more stimulation. We need to get millions of American kids, not just the geniuses, excited about innovation and entrepreneurship again. We need to make 2010 what Obama should have made 2009: the year of innovation, the year of making our pie bigger, the year of “Start-Up America.”For examples Tom points to a pair of programs already endorsed by the President. One is National Lab Day:Obama should make the centerpiece of his presidency mobilizing a million new start-up companies that won’t just give us temporary highway jobs, but lasting good jobs that keep America on the cutting edge. The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things. Without inventing more new products and services that make people more productive, healthier or entertained — that we can sell around the world — we’ll never be able to afford the health care our people need, let alone pay off our debts.
Obama should bring together the country’s leading innovators and ask them: “What legislation, what tax incentives, do we need right now to replicate you all a million times over” — and make that his No. 1 priority. Inspiring, reviving and empowering Start-up America is his moon shot.
Any teacher in America, explains the entrepreneur Jack Hidary, the chairman of N.L.D., can go to the Web site NationalLabDay.org and enter the science project he or she is interested in teaching, or get an idea for one. N.L.D. will match teachers with volunteer scientists and engineers in their areas for mentoring.A very cool program. (I know Jack, from way back, and he's a great guy.) So is the other one Tom mentions: the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship.“As soon as you have a match, the scientists and the students communicate directly or via Skype and collaborate on a project,” said Hidary. “We have a class in Chicago asking for civil engineers to teach them how to build a bridge. In Idaho, a class is asking for a scientist to help them build a working river delta inside their classroom.”
But there's a policy-level fight that the President needs to take up, and it will be against some of his political friends in Hollywood and the telcos. That's the fight to save the Internet itself.
The Internet is the most supportive infrastructure ever created for both free speech and free enterprise. It is the Net, more than anything else, that has made the world -- as Tom so aptly put it a couple books back -- flat.
That's because the Net itself is flat. What makes it flat is not just the breadth of its pipes, but its indifference to how those pipes are used, and to what flows through them.
The fight over net neutrality is a