Elfenworks Foundation Initiative - Investing in Science Leadership, Inventiveness and Creativity
Bottom line: investing in this area is a smart way to shore up our comparative advantage as a nation
Americans are inventors, innovators, healers, explorers, visionaries and entrepreneurs. We have a proud and long history of this --- Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein (a transplant to our shores), Thomas Edison, The Wright Brothers, amidst a plethora of others.
Want a blast from the past? To experience
another era, funky but innovative vintage
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It is in our enlightened self-interest to foster an abundant future for the country's children,
and at The Elfenworks Foundation, we feel this can be brought about by recognizing and investing
in our areas of relative advantage. In an increasingly inter-connected world, our best
strengths have been in our people: our inventiveness, entrepreneurship, work ethic.
This has been historically fostered by a belief that differential hard work will be
differentially rewarded, that through hard work and private enterprise it is possible to get ahead.
Fostered further by an historically free and high-quality educational system which empowered the entrepreneur with the skills needed for success. And it got a great boost in the 1960s because of a geopolitical situation which made it useful to have a national goal of getting a man on the moon, one of humankind's greatest accomplishments. Less spoken about but nonetheless true is that we still reap today the benefits of all of the scientific discoveries made because of that historic effort.
Knowing all of this, we have a key to what can be done to foster that peculiarly American combination of intellectual curiosity and entrepreneurship, to nurture a love of learning, and to inspire and educate our next generation of science entrepreneurs, namely:
- Focusing on education and educational access, with science education as a particular priority [more]
- Refocusing on the benefits of investment in basic research (colleges and government agencies such as NASA)and public/private partnerships [more]
- Studying effectiveness and fostering best practices [more]
- Initiative on examining and mitigating unintended consequences - towards an environment of freedom and democracy so that intellectual curiosity can flourish within this environment [more]
At the conclusion of Tracks of Hope, we ponder what it would be like to have a goal again. The goal could be in any number of initiatives, including green, space, water, or other areas in need of attention. We invite you to join us in these thoughts.
