Invigorating the Economy through Entrepreneurship

Back in April 2008, I gave a small talk at a CIO conference to a group of 100 CIOs about the future of the IT industry and the ripple effects the global financial meltdown will have. Unfortunately, most of what I predicted happened including the problems related to subprime, credit, housing, oil price, insurance, depression of dollars, weak Consumer Confidence Index (CCI), unemployment, Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF), and the national debt, and we are still feeling the pain of all these problems.  The official recession ended some time ago, but it does not feel that way. In fact, we may be entering into a double recession.  We are going through a recovery without new jobs. There are many plausible reasons for this jobless recovery including the following:

• We have become largely more efficient in what we do by automating many of things that we used to do manually.  As an IT community, we have been driving this efficiency for decades and finally, it is more profound and noticeable.
• We have shifted low-level skill jobs to outsourcing.
• We are moving from a service-oriented to a knowledge-oriented society, which demands a more analytical workforce.  In this environment, more can be done with less people.
• We simply have not kept up with innovation, so that there is no next big industry to move the excess in the labor pool. In addition, many displaced workers may not have the high-level skills to move into the new high-tech industry and it will take too much resources and time to equip these people with the appropriate skillset.
• Finally, there is a lack of emphasis on STEM education, a vital element for success. From Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO’s perspective, ‘Public and private partnerships to promote STEM are critically important. We all have a vested interest in advancing our country’s proficiency in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math as a means to driving innovation and jobs – which are key to fueling our economic growth and global competitiveness.’[1] This has to be realized by the policy makers and should be seen as an investment.

Read the entire post by Dennis Anderson, Dan’l Lewin, Sharon Koshy and Rogerio Panigassi at the TechCorner on Microsoft’s TechNet site.