An Innovation Action Plan for Obama

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These facilities would provide shared platforms for businesses, thus lowering many of the costs involved in expanding a startup: back-office support, IT capability, training and expertise, and financial management assistance. Notice that I am not talking about joint ventures, just shared costs. Nothing should be done to eliminate competition. (Has anybody seen a new engine come out of shared R&D by the auto industry?)

Innovation Training

Whether online or on-site, these university-based executive education programs would teach the practical skills of innovation. Like leadership and management, innovation is a skill that can be taught and a process that can be learned. Innovation is a systematic and disciplined way of using a step-by-step process to explore customer needs, generate solutions, analyze winning concepts, develop the product or service, test it, and launch it. To encourage enrollment, the government would offer tuition tax credits, grants, or loans. Universities might step up to the plate and award innovation training scholarships themselves.

Intellectual Property Auction

Ocean Tomo, a Chicago financial firm, has established an auction system for intellectual property rights and patents. Businesses frequently have many more marketable ideas than the capacity to launch them. Whether it's conducted by the government or outsourced to a private company, a national IP auction would provide businesses with a secondary income stream, enabling them to get up-front cash or licensing fees for proven concepts, inventions, and prototypes that are otherwise sitting around unused. Additionally, these ideas would end up in the hands of businesses eager to take them to market.

Innovation Index Fund

We can help put private money to work stimulating business investment. How? By establishing a unit trust fund to attract public investment in innovation. The companies in the index would be ones who have been the most successful in the recent past, thanks to their innovation. Specifically, companies would be selected based on their financial performance, R&D investments, and creation of new technologies, categories, and markets. The key will be to select companies that innovate year-in, year-out as a core business strategy. Management fees would cover the costs of administering the fund. The benefits to investors will be higher returns and a collective investment in the future of our economic health.

Who runs all this? In an earlier essay, I proposed that Obama create a Secretary of Innovation. Whether it is this new cabinet member or someone else in a position that reports directly to the President, we need someone to serve as the national champion of innovation who can put these ideas into action. Just as important, we need Obama to make innovation a front-and-center issue, as this seven-point plan certainly would.

Thomas D. Kuczmarski is founder and president of Kuczmarski & Associates, an innovation consultancy based in Chicago. The author of five books, Kuczmarski has also taught product and service innovation at Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management for 27 years.

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