National Export Initiative’s Michael Masserman on Boosting U.S. Small-Business

 Expert’s Corner:  Trade by Christian Bonawandt | April 23rd, 2013 Email | Print | Post Comment Share Michael Masserman President Barack Obama’s goal of doubling exports by the close of fiscal year 2014 has been met with both skepticism and support. The National Export Initiative’s executive director, Michael Masserman, is a key figure in meeting that target, and he spoke with IMT about supporting and expanding small-business exports. Related Stories Weekly Industry Crib Sheet: Details of the National Export Initiative Signs of U.S. Export Initiative Paying Off Will Obama’s Export Plan Cross the Finish Line? As executive director for export policy, promotion, and strategy with the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Masserman is charged with executing the National Export Initiative (NEI), under which the export-doubling goal falls. In an exclusive interview with IMT, Masserman discussed the challenges facing the NEI, as well as sharing insights about how U.S. businesses can take advantage of NEI programs. Masserman explained that the NEI’s mission is “to improve the conditions that directly affect the private sector’s ability to export – working to remove trade barriers abroad, help firms and farmers overcome hurdles to entering new markets, and assist with financing.” The Dept. of Commerce acknowledges that only 1 percent of American businesses export products. Masserman explained that this was because “many smaller companies mistakenly believe that exporting is too complicated and just for large firms, or they are not aware of all the export and financing resources available to them.” He insisted that the exporting process is simple enough for even the smallest businesses to accomplish, thanks to the Internet, international logistics and shipping services, the availability of trade financing, and U.S. government assistance programs. “If a business has a strong track record of selling in the U.S., one of the world’s most open and competitive markets, it’s likely a good candidate for making international sales,” he said. But a low percentage of exporting businesses is not the core obstacle for the NEI, according to Masserman. “As the president has said, the U.S. needs to buy less and sell more, which is why his administration is focused on supporting exports,” he stated, noting that in 2012 the annual trade deficit actually dropped by nearly $20 billion to $540 billion. “Despite global economic headwinds, our exports are still growing faster than our imports,” he added. “In 2012, growth in exports of goods and services outpaced the growth of imports of goods and services in both dollar and percentage terms for the first time since 2007, with exports growing by $92.6 billion or 4.4 percent. This trend has continued into the first two months of 2013, according to the latest data.” Still, the U.S. has achieved only 40 percent of the growth needed to double exports, meaning the remaining 60 percent of growth has to take place in the next two years. Masserman implied that the U.S. economy is already on track. “The U.S. is now selling more goods and services to the 95 percent of consumers who live outside of our borders than at any time in our history,” Masserman noted. “In 2012, U.S. exports hit an all-time record at $2.2 trillion, building on the record-setting performance of 2011 and in the face of significant global headwinds.” Masserman also emphasized that increasing exports is only part of the goal, as the Obama administration also hopes to create 2 million high-paying, export-related jobs. “Record-breaking levels of U.S. exports through 2012 supported an additional 1.3 million U.S. jobs – so we are more than 60 percent of the way to creating 2 million additional jobs just two years into our effort, well ahead of schedule,” he said. Among the many ways the Obama administration is trying to grow exports is a series of trade partnerships. However, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which would further open trade with Europe, has been criticized since the E.U. is struggling with a financial crisis. While Masserman acknowledged that U.S. sales to Europe have fallen, he noted that certain key sectors have actually improved, including aerospace, pharmaceuticals and medicines, petroleum and coal products, medical equipment, motor vehicles, and agricultural and construction machinery. The largest increases, according to Masserman, were in France, Austria, Luxembourg, Cyprus, and parts of Central Europe, including the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia. He further justified the trade agreement by highlighting its size and scope: “The U.S.-E.U. economic relationship is already the world’s largest, accounting for one-third of total goods and services trade and nearly half of global economic output.” So, what about the world’s fastest-growing economies: Brazil, India, and China? They have not been neglected, according to Masserman. “The Obama administration uses many other tools in addition to trade negotiations to improve trade relations with countries across the globe, such as the Joint Committee on Commerce and Trade with China. The U.S.-Brazil Commercial Dialogues and the U.S.-Brazil CEO Forum are evidence of the administration’s commitment to strengthening the U.S.-Brazil economic relationship. Additionally, we have led trade missions to India, as well as to several [other] countries around the globe.” The best potential for export growth lies in helping small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) establish themselves and expand internationally, and that’s where much of the NEI’s efforts are focused. “Exports by SMEs totaled $440 billion in 2011, representing more than one-third of total U.S. exports. This confirms that small-business exports continue to grow and reaffirms our focus on ensuring small businesses know about and have access to the federal resources available to assist them,” Masserman said. Masserman touted the work of the Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank and the Small Business Administration (SBA) in helping support SMEs. He attributed the Ex-Im with helping 3,300 small businesses expand their exports in 2012, 650 of which had never worked with Ex-Im before. Meanwhile, the SBA has backed more than 2,400 loans to 3,500 small businesses through its financing programs and has trained 273 Small Business Development Center counselors to help small businesses new to the exporting market, he explained. “We recognize there is still more work to do,” Masserman said. “That is why the Obama Administration continues to do everything possible to support American farmers, workers, and businesses as they compete in the global marketplace.” Share

A New Engineering Profession Is Emerging: Decision Coach

 
A New Profession Is Emerging: Decision Coach Presentation Slides,

$0 (PDF) These slides are from a presentation Baker Street publisher, Dr. Stephen Barrager, made at a recent INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research in Huntington Beach, California. The emperor of all business processes is the process we use to make strategic decisions. Decisions like product design, portfolio selection, geographic expansion, and the updating our CIT infrastructure. The most popular way of making these decisions is to form a team. The teams are made up of executives and people from engineering and operations. The cultures and interests of these groups are different. Their experience working in teams can vary greatly. The teams muddle through. Decisions do get made. Too often the decisions get endlessly reworked and opportunities for innovation are lost. A team needs a coach. The coach can help the team design a process, select the right tools, bring skilled facilitation, and take responsibility for project management. A well coached team is more efficient and more innovative. The ideal coach comes from the engineering culture. Engineers have the analytical and design skills that are so important in complex situations. They are comfortable working with big data and models. They also bring a profound understanding of technology and markets. Many engineers are skilled at working with both the executive and the operating cultures. Many engineers have a natural entrepreneurial spirit. Organizations are notoriously bad at learning from past mistakes. A coach can provide the organizational memory that is so important for learning from one project to the next. Many engineers are in fact playing the coaching role. The role is gradually getting recognized in many leading organizations. Visitor Agreement ¦ Privacy Policy © 2013 Baker Street Publishing, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

For full articles with all slides, click here: http://bakerstreetpublishing.com/publications/a-new-profession-is-emerging-decision-coach/?goback=%2Egde_43593_member_229343744

What is a Career Integration Grant?

CIG, Career Integration Grant, is the successor to the former Reintegration Grants (ERG & IRG). CIG provides financial assistance to experienced researchers who are offered with a stable research position in an EU-27 Membre State (MS) or in an Associated Country (AC) where they have not worked or resided for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to the call deadline. Researchers who have benefited from an ERG or IRG are ineligible for CIG. You will find more information on the call at the Research Participant Portal.
For complete article click the link: http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/page/call_FP7?callIdentifier=FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG&specificProgram=PEOPLE#wlp_call_FP7

good news from CERN- First three-year LHC running period reaches a conclusion

Having supported many projects whithin CERN for over 20 years, haveing blanket PO from them over the years along with another friendly supplier from States, the writer was privileged to work on some of the most exciting projects in the world, including the Atlas machine. Managed by personal friend of mine, we have seen its highs and its hurdles in progress till its final completion several years ago. Any news from CERN is usually a good news for the writer, thus the following PR is here for your reading pleasure:

Geneva 14 February 2013. At 7.24am, the shift crew in the CERN1 Control Centre extracted the beams from the Large Hadron Collider, bringing the machine’s first three-year running period to a successful conclusion. The LHC’s first run has seen major advances in physics, including the discovery of a new particle that looks increasingly like the long–sought Higgs boson, announced on 4 July 2012. And during the last weeks of the run, the remarkable figure of 100 petabytes of data stored in the CERN mass-storage systems was surpassed. This data volume is roughly equivalent to 700 years of full HD-quality movies.
“We have every reason to be very satisfied with the LHC’s first three years,” said CERN Director-General Rolf Heuer. “The machine, the experiments, the computing facilities and all infrastructures behaved brilliantly, and we have a major scientific discovery in our pocket.”
The LHC now begins its first long shutdown, LS1. Over the coming months major consolidation and maintenance work will be carried out across the whole of CERN’s accelerator chain. The LHC will be readied for higher energy running, and the experiments will undergo essential maintenance. LHC running is scheduled to resume in 2015, with the rest of the CERN complex starting up again in the second half of 2014.
“There is a great deal of consolidation work to do on CERN’s whole accelerator complex, as well as the LHC itself,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators and Technology, Steve Myers. “We’ll essentially be rebuilding the interconnections between LHC magnets, so when we resume running in 2015, we will be able to operate the machine at its design energy of 7TeV per beam”.
The LHC exceeded all expectations in its first three-year run, delivering significantly more data to the experiments than initially foreseen. Physicists measure data quantity in units known as inverse femtobarns, and by the time the last high energy proton-proton data were recorded in December, the ATLAS and CMS experiments had each recorded around 30 inverse femtobarns, of which over 23 were recorded in 2012.
To put this into context, the particle whose discovery was announced on 4 July 2012 was found by analysing around 12 inverse femtobarns. That means CERN’s experimental physics community still has plenty of data to analyse during LS1.
“There will be plenty of physics to do during LS1, and not only at the LHC,” said CERN Research Director Sergio Bertolucci. “The LHC is the flagship of CERN’s experimental programme, but is nevertheless just one component of a very varied research infrastructure. All of the other experiments here have on-going analyses, so I’m looking forward to many interesting results emerging as LS1 progresses.”
For the first weeks of 2013, the LHC has been colliding protons with lead ions as part of the programme to understand matter as it would have been just after the Big Bang. The last four days of the run saw a return to proton-proton collisions, this time at reduced energy. These collisions will provide useful data for interpreting the data recorded with lead ions. Single beam studies will continue until the weekend, when the process of bringing the LHC up to room temperature will begin, allowing LS1 work to get under way.
Video: http://cds.cern.ch/record/1516001
Picture: http://cds.cern.ch/record/1516031?ln=en
Press Contact:
CERN press office, press.office@cern.ch
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new year 2013

No-one I know of says 2011 was a pleasant year to be an investor – 90% of fund manager’s loathed it and lost money due to a mixture of wild and unpredictable currency movements and of course crazy volatility and massive irrational selloffs. Then came 2012, which was much better but not without it's moments, but all in all a better year despite all the dramas of the Europe debt crisis and fiscal cliff. However, 2013 will see most of this behind us.
I think 2013 will have a lower political involvement and that alone will make it a better year and investors can go back to concentrating on what’s important – buying shares in businesses that are doing well, based on common sense and good solid business fundamentals – won’t that be nice?

Happy and prosperous new year

As usual I wish you and yours a happy, healthy and prosperous new year, to all readers and co-editors of this blog.

best regards
Stefan (Baginski)
twitter  @sbaginski22

Waka Waka strikes successfully again!

- PRESS RELEASE -
for immediate release

Power to the World with WakaWaka Personal Solar Power Station
Most efficient solar lamp in the world now provides ability to charge any cell phone and tablet with USB connector .
Haarlem (The Netherlands) —December 10, 2012 – The WakaWaka Power is the much anticipated follow-up to the very successful WakaWaka Light, winner of 4 Accenture Innovation Awards last month. Building on the original design, the WakaWaka Power is thinner and  lighter and features a Sunpower solar cell, Intivation power management and much more battery capacity than the previous version.  It deliveres up to 60 lumens of bright, safe, bright reading light for more than 40 hours on an 8 hour solar charge as well as the ability to charge cell phones and tablets.
Always Power at Your Fingertips
The WakaWaka Power is the culmination of many months of design to create a product that is both a fashionable and a functional tool for everyday use. With the growth in mobile devices, there is a increased need to have a reliable, efficient, portable device that ensures power at your fingertips at all times. The WakaWaka power was dramatically upgraded with the best solar technology on the market today, which makes it up to 200% more efficient than comparable products, in particular in low light conditions. The sun does not always shine.
Personal Solar Power Station
Consumer feedback has guided the development to meet the needs of not only consumers but also of disaster prep, emergency services and even military. Four different light modes generate a bright torch light down to a low intensity night safety light. As an extra a SOS emergency beacon is programmed. Being so compact and reliable as well as very easy to use with just a single large button, the WakaWaka Power is well suited to be the premier Personal Solar Power Station worldwide.
Crowdfunding
On 12-12-12 the pre-sale of the WakaWaka Power will start on Kickstarter.com . The suggested retail price for the WakaWaka Power is $79.00. During this pre-sale Kickstarter event, visitors can purchase the WakaWaka Power for as little as $49.00/unit.  The funds raised will be used to take the prototype into production ready for delivery to retail stores around May.
Light Up Haiti
For each WakaWaka Power sold during the crowdfunding campaign, one WakaWaka Light (lights only) will be delivered to UNHCR to be distributed to a Haitian family living in darkness. Still today, 3 years after the devastating earthquake in 2010, more than 370,000 Haitians live in shelters, without any electricity, heavily dependent on toxic, expensive and extremely dangerous kerosene lamps. This short video indicates the situation there.
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