The chief of innovation in the Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration wants to bring more entrepreneurs into government, perhaps as two-year fellows, she said on Wednesday.
“There is lots of entrepreneurial thinking in government—it’s surprising,” Julie Lenzer Kirk, director of Commerce’s Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, told small business owners at a conference of the American Council for Technology-Industry Advisory Council. But she added that when she ran the state of Maryland’s Center for Entrepreneurship, “I would tell business people, ‘You’re my tribe.’ When I got to government, I’m still trying to fit into the tribe.”
The EDA’s role, Kirk said in a pep talk to small business contractors titled “It Takes a Village,” is not direct investment like the Small Business Administration, but helping build capacity through partnerships, grants, and tools that bring people together. “Making sure state and local officials understand that small businesses are the job creators is essential,” she added. It’s “connecting the dots” on a regional basis because “what works in Detroit is not what is needed in Atlanta.”
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