Last Friday, the University of Virginia’s Miller Center was at the National Press Club in Washington, DC to release “Building a Nation of Makers: Six Ideas to Accelerate the Innovated Capacity of America’s Manufacturing SMEs.” The report was prepared by the Milstein Symposium, a five-year initiative launched in 2013 by the Miller Center to bring together policymakers, business and industry leaders, scholars, and journalists in bipartisan, innovative collaboration to rebuild the American Dream. Its first symposium centers on a “Creating the Jobs of the Future” theme.
The first commission for this symposium was co-chaired by former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and former Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, and focuses on how to facilitate sustainable growth of America’s SMEs — small and medium enterprises. It presented its ideas as six policy suggestions:
- Talent Investment Loans to expand human capital
- Upside-Down Degrees to connect classroom learning with on-the-job learning
- A Skills Census to build a more efficient skilled labor force
- A National Supply Chain Initiative to fully map America’s manufacturing ecosystems
- Expanded Technology and Engineering Certification Programs for up-skilling high school students
- A “Big Trends-Small Firms” Initiative to diffuse the latest technologies to manufacturing SMEs
The second of three total commissions will be discussing entrepreneurship and self-employment: how we can “ensure that the latest innovations in information technology, collaborative networking, and advanced manufacturing are more widely available to help reverse this great “startup slowdown” and generate new jobs for the middle class.” We’ll be keeping an eye out for it. Until then, the entire “Buiding a Nation of Makers” report is available here.
AAM intern Lauren Pak authored this blog post.