Small Business Econometric Study / Trends From SBA

Highlights from " An Empirical Approach to Characterize Rural Small Business Growth and Profitability"

• Education was a significant explanatory variablein assessing the growth of rural small businesses.The number of high school graduates increases thenumber of rural small businesses. Moreover, one of the challenges facing rural communities is how to retain a younger, more educated population.

• The amount of “natural amenities” available in an area can impact rural small business growth. This is defined as the attractiveness of a place to live,based on factors such as climate, topography, and proximity to surface water.

• Rural areas have difficulty attracting profitable,high-tech businesses, primarily because of a lack ofboth an educated labor force and necessary infrastructure.

• Rural policy initiatives are geared primarilytoward specific topics or regions, which often proveseffective when there are sufficient resources to helprural small businesses. According to individualsinterviewed on the topic, rural development centersand non-profit organizations are vital components foreconomic development.

• Some explanatory variables were specific to particular states. These range from the number of ruralprimary care physicians per capita in North Carolinato immigration growth in Maine.

Interesting read (for wonks and mortals).

The New of the New

If one looks at the real and virtual "stuff" we produce and consume, one of the big state changes comes from new economies of scale mediated by networked information.

Adoption rates for all sorts of things begin more and more to look like vertical lines (e.g., faster broadband versus slower) and better product architectures afford no small degree of modularity and component based systems.

What used to be called information float has become, to a great extent, less of a factor because federations of "smart friends and strangers" can rapidly vet vapor and mojo.

This new "component based and interoperable" lot of hardware, software, bio, and info means that the friction of creation and status quo form less of a barrier than before. This is the kind of environment that welcomes punctuated equalibria (evolution by jerks, as they say!) and disintermediation.

Removing (or mitigating) other frictional issues such as health care in turn improves the formation of new, and I assert, generally smaller organizations. From personal experience, I can say that the 1990s recession spawned a good number of high quality companies and think tanks.

With the provisioning of fractional services (payroll, HR, storage, webservers...) that reflect almost atomistic (and often "free") marginal costs compared to the big box running at 1% capacity, the formula for the production function begins to take rational, versus whole number or integer, steps. Again, with health care, the exploitation of the quaint statistic of large numbers in a common pool.... well, you do the math.

Trust in God but lock your car... I do believe that opportunities will be exploited if only from the fatigue of status quo and the inertia of the known.

Conservation Economy (via Ecotrust)

Portland Oregon's Ecotrust.org has made extensive use of a pattern language (see Christopher Alexander Pattern Language) as a design framework for sustainable systems.

"A Conservation Economy

When the health of ecosystems and communities is not integrated into economic activities, all three suffer. In turn, economic dependence on destructive activities creates apparent conflicts between work, nature, and community. How can we create an economy that effectively meets human needs while regenerating natural systems? An economy which grows organically — and fills new niches — by working with nature and enriching human capacities?

In A Conservation Economy, Economic arrangements of all kinds are gradually redesigned so that they restore, rather than deplete, Natural Capital and Social Capital. This will create extraordinary opportunities for those who foresee and drive these changes. The Fundamental Needs of people — and the Ecosystem Services which sustain them — are the starting point for a different kind of economic prosperity that can endure generation after generation."

The details can be found at http://www.conservationeconomy.net/conservation_economy.html

Destination Cloud Computing

Just a lead in: cloud computing will be vital for "small" businesses because "a man's got to know his limitations."

Now we might twitter, and for all that companies growing from startup to second stage, usually around 5+ employees, all at once notice a rumble in the fuselage.

We had service bureaus, used ADP for payroll, and edge into Quicken to run the books. Cloud computing, next big thing (and has been for years).

Disaster. Recovery. Invention.

In most of this last year's pieces here at the land of SANNAS (a fine team of wonks and also a fantastic snack with a good lager) the theme often centered upon increasing demands of distributed ephemeral data and the challenge of managing the process of custody and validation.
This article's being typed into a 1Gb stick; about 2Mb of that stick contains an encryption program; acceptable overhead IMHO for the promise of securing the Next Great Novel and Sudoku downloads, as well as the launch codes for the Acme ® ‘Lil Armageddon family of products, my sonnets to Paris Hilton and other juicy bits.

I do not, as they say, keep a tidy desk. My brain stays healthy by understanding my own LIFO filing system and an ability to understand the strata and the high probability parts of the piles wherein nestles the Airline Magazine or the clipping of a local paper's crank I wanted to riff upon at leisure. This represents an elegant strategy promoting mental health albeit with a risk of structural collapse of the entropy-friendly piles of the arcane lore.

Somewhere, someone must be working on a desktop computing metaphor that allows for significant standing loads. Bearing walls. Like that. At the very least, maybe something like "The Clapper" to find that 1Gb slice of memory...

So, here's the thing: data all over the place, connected and unconnected with the not so subtle growth of metadata to describe the context and provenance of information along with the burden of incremental data to manage the data and thereby the added processing cycles for data management itself. Extremely bright designers have delivered high value tool infrastructures, and I, for one, am not worthy of holding their pocket protectors in the area of difficult code and algorithm implementation, and generally customer focused implementations.

But in the realm of Disaster Recovery mechanisms and services, preemptive trumps reactive. Some scenarios of the mode of disaster, use cases, deliver an example.

Pandemic Flu, Weather, Earthquake, Toxic Spill, extended outages of power, water, other broken infrastructure should be the object of sandtable exercises, at a minimum, to game through what (might likely) work in these scenarios.

Rather makes removable media a bit of a problem during times of "saw fan, engaged same", not to mention getting to the unnetworked unautomated and unavailable mélange of annotated manuals and Post It notes which, don't you know, are the keys to the kingdom, whether one acknowledges that or not.

The adhocracy of portable data (iPhone, et.al.)seems to drive the industry towards some sort of nexus, wherein the overall practice and form of storage management and optimization will trend toward something that looks very much like Open Source toolkits and standards. For some this will be the defining disaster; however, other mature technology (e.g., MVS et seq) informs us that the core functionality and benefits of the "mature" technology do not by any means always disappear, but become the subject of new core businesses and invention. Ye Olde Virtual Machine has shown a tenacity in meeting the market need, albeit in quite new forms.
So, vis a vis Disaster Recovery, the pressure is on for shifts that make for highly interoperable and fungible networked storage resources (think Googleplex) with arbitrarily attached processing and storage tools. A lot of the "math" to predict the future comes from the good works of people like Gene Amdahl and Jim Gray (of Microsoft fame) in that a feasibility test can be accomplished with relative ease; with new cost factors and performance factors in hand, the maxim of "in the long run, all costs are variable" will again prove in with new invention. Of particular interest will be the results of open standards initiatives (akin to Web 3.0 posited mechanisms)where ontology will bloom like kudzu in Dixie.

And that, as the young lady informs us, is "hot".