The Small Business Watchdog

While it’s not common knowledge, Gainesville, Florida, has exported some pretty valuable commodities to the rest of the world. While Tom Petty, of Heartbreakers fame, may be flashier, no less valuable is Gatorade. The granddaddy of sports drinks is also a poster child for successful university research commercialization.
Dr. Robert Cade and several researchers on staff [...]

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On March 12 and 13, the Office of Advocacy rolled out the next installment in its national conversation on innovation and entrepreneurship. This extended dialog took place at the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Business School in the heart of downtown Pittsburgh. The event continued Advocacy’s listening initiative, “Small Business and Government: Maximizing Entrepreneurship, Driving Innovation,” [...]

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Dreams came true this entrepreneurial season as New Orleans Entrepreneur Week (NOEW) drew to a close last Friday.  To the winners went the spoils—over $200,000 in cash prizes to local start-ups with the best ideas and business pitch. This year’s NOEW was abuzz with activity, engaging more than 3,000 individuals in small business dialogue, including [...]

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Recently, I had the privilege of participating in the annual State of Missoula Commerce Report hosted by the Missoula Chamber of Commerce. The event, called “The Impacts of Small Business: A National, Regional and Local Perspective,” focused on small business health in Missoula, Montana’s second largest city, as well as the rest of the state. [...]

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Spend a day in the greater Kansas City area and you can’t help but catch the vibe. Kansas City is intent on transforming itself into America’s most entrepreneurial city. Kansas City is drawing from a rich entrepreneurial heritage. Names like Bloch, Kauffman, and Stowers—a past generation of entrepreneurs—grew their business fortunes here, employed thousands, and [...]

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How are small businesses doing in your state? The Office of Advocacy has just published the Small Business Profiles for the States and Territories, to help answer this question. These profiles are brief two-page documents that give policymakers, small business owners, economists, and many others a detailed picture of the economic role of small businesses [...]

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In December, Region VII Advocate Becky Greenwald was a special guest speaker at the Women in Business Small Business Conference and Expo. The event was sponsored by the Nebraska Business Development Center/Procurement Technical Assistance Center at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Hosting the event was Nebraska Congressman Lee Terry, who recognized 12 women business [...]

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As 2012 winds down, the Office of Advocacy continues to build up an impressive number of achievements working with federal agencies and small business owners to bring transparency to the regulatory process. The synergy between our research and regulatory work continues to strengthen both areas; timely and actionable research is the foundation of efficient and [...]

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All across Region III, diverse institutions are promoting innovation and entrepreneurship in novel and energetic ways. These are exciting developments because they are expanding discourse and making room for disparate groups to deliberately and systematically work together. This was my takeaway from three events in which I recently participated.
In Pittsburgh, the AlphaLab Demo Day featured [...]

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has announced its intent to withdraw a proposed rule that would have required the use of turtle excluder devices (TEDs) by commercial shrimping vessels in the southeast fisheries.  The rule would have affected an estimated 6,500 shrimp fishermen.  In its regulatory flexibility analysis of the proposed rule, NOAA [...]

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