Can President-elect Barack Obama save the economy? Well, it’s true that he has assembled a crackerjack team of economic advisers, but that’s only one way Obama can help America get back on track.

American entrepreneurs and salespeople of all stripes have recognized the opportunity in Obama’s win – namely, that anything associated with the soon-to-be first family seems to turn to gold. And with the inauguration two weeks away, it seems that the offerings are becoming more plentiful and increasingly creative.

The San Mateo online retailer CafePress, which allows users to sell their own T-shirt designs and other merchandise, offers 3.3 million pieces of Obamabilia – with more than 6,000 items alone dedicated to terrier (the dog breed) support for the president-elect.

The New York Times estimated that $200 million in Obama stuff had been sold by late November. Every day, it seems there are more television commercials, stores and street vendors hawking things Obama – hats, T-shirts, buttons, spoons – in every American city.

The phenomenon has gone global. In France, a businessman has created bubble-gum-flavored Obama soda in a red and blue can emblazoned with the “Yes We Can” motto. And the Times of London recently reported that an inflatable Nativity scene featuring the Obama family was a holiday best-seller in Naples, Italy.

Photo by CafePress.

The Amish, the religious sect that has determinedly kept the modern world at bay, have been leaving a quiet life of farming for jobs in small businesses — all the while trying to balance their own values with the culture of the marketplace.

“Their whole intent is to not be caught up in the hustle and bustle of the modern world,” said John Swaffer, advertising manager at the Keim Lumber Company, a lumber mill in Charm, Ohio.

The Amish move into the world of commerce has been more out of necessity than desire. Over the last 16 years, the Amish population in the United States — mostly in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana — has nearly doubled, to 230,000, and the decreasing availability and increasing cost of farmland has forced many of these agrarian families, especially the younger generation, to gravitate to small business as their main source of income.

The businesses, which favor such Amish skills as furniture-making, quilting, construction work and cooking, have been remarkably successful. Despite a lack of even a high school education (the Amish leave school after the eighth grade), hundreds of Amish entrepreneurs have built profitable businesses based on the Amish values of high quality, integrity and hard work. A 2004 Goshen College study reported that the failure rate of Amish businesses is less than 5 percent, compared with a national small-business default rate that is far higher.

Photo by merlin1075.

Peter Zummo, a senior double-majoring in design and mechanical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is used to explaining the products he thinks up for his studio-class assignments. But last spring, he found himself answering questions of a different kind in a conference room at Rensselaer’s office of technology commercialization, which tracks and patents inventions made on campus.

Zummo and his classmate Matthew Naples had designed a water bottle that could be filled with sand and reused as a brick to build housing in developing countries. The director of the office, Charles Rancourt, wanted to know: When had they come up with their design? Had they held brainstorming sessions on campus or off? What equipment had they used to produce their prototypes?

Colleges and universities own the ideas and technologies invented by the people who work for them, including professors and graduate students who are paid to do research. Most universities also own inventions created by students using a significant amount of their resources, even if the inventors are undergraduates like Zummo and Naples.

The question of whether the two students or R.P.I. owned their invention was a tricky one. They had first designed plastic bottles that snapped together, Lego style, with two other students for a freshman design class project that challenged them to solve a social problem. Their idea was to keep the billions of water bottles that people in developing nations throw away each year out of landfills while providing the poor with free building materials.

With entrepreneurship booming, especially in courses that mix M.B.A. candidates with budding physicians or engineers, more and younger students are coming up with ideas that have commercial potential. While formal programs offer classes in managing intellectual property, plenty of students develop their ideas with little knowledge of how ownership is determined or the pros and cons of involving the university.

Continue reading “Who Owns Your Great Idea?”

Photo by hisks.