Fire Up the Engines of Innovation

A number of people in Northern Virginia have asked me what should be done about the DOD BRAC Report. The answer is to look for opportunities in new high tech areas like the Semantic Web and the Hydrogen Economy. Move away from end-to-end or enterprise applications. Concentrate on Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Executives from SMEs have been saying for years, that all the easy problems have been solved and that they don’t need another database application. They need applications that will actually address real-world problems concerns.

Some believe that companies in Northern Virginia can’t address the concerns of private sector executives. Some say that we don’t have what it takes to compete in the global market place. Some say our companies can not exist without government contracts. They say that the entire region has fallen behind Silicon Valley because they have a better entrepreneur support system. We say it feels like 1994 and that it’s a good time to be an entrepreneur in Northern Virginia.