Hisham Sarwar
Obama’s administration plans focusing on higher education, startup economy, investment, and entrepreneurship have been recently introduced. Schools, venture capital firms, and tech companies have made commitments regarding these new plans and have promised to pass it on over the private sector.
For more than 200 member universities, The American Society of Engineering Education has been developing diversity and inclusion practices. The schools in order to nurture diversity in its engineering programs have also signed a pledge. More than 30 investment firms in alliance with accelerators have pledged to diversify the access to capital and to trail and share the data regarding diversity of its portfolios. Also for supporting the publish recruitment goals and diversity metrics around 46 tech companies including Xerox and TaskRabbit have unified with the Tech inclusion Pledge.
Although it’s a lot of pledge to stay updated but it’s the result of many years of hard work and pressure given by White House to tech companies to come forward for solving its diversity issues. With Trump’s administration, private sector is under more pressure to take the responsibility and start on with its work. According to Tom Kalil, deputy director of technology and innovation at White House, some of the data indicates that more diverse firms are more likely to achieve success. People with dissimilar backgrounds are a big reason for bringing innovation. There might be other interests in doing such work but currently there is a need to solve diversity problems in the White House. White House has been putting all its efforts to foster the relationship between companies seeking advice and organizations such as Code 2040 and National Center for Women and IT. President Obama’s Legacy on entrepreneurship is also being aided with such efforts.
The efforts by the administration are nationwide but Obama’s main focuses are the Silicon Valley Startups as he declared the first 33 companies signing the Tech Inclusion Pledge at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit this summer.
According to Kalil, job creation is the first reason for paying so much attention to entrepreneurship. It has a very strong impact on job creation. Secondly, entrepreneurship and startups can challenge the status quo and are always eager to involve in disruptive innovation that might not be easy for other first. And the third most important thing is that entrepreneurs are always enthusiastic to solve problems that require innovation.
With the onset of new administration, nothing can be predicted what changes will be brought to Obama’s economic policies. But president himself has encouraged his staff to pass all the information about this work to the upcoming administration. Kalil states that academia, investors, and companies need to keep a track on their pledges to diversity and inclusion. This work will be carried on by private sector where companies and organizations are going to put all their efforts for this issue.
Via: Tech Crunch
