Tomorrow – The Rules for Growth, the 2011 Kauffman [Foundation] State of Entrepreneurship Address and Luncheon at the National Press Club, “convened to explore effective, low-cost ways to promote innovation and accelerate U.S. economic growth, emphasizing changes in law and legal institutions that do not add to the national deficit.” (The event is sold out, so to speak, but you can get on the waiting list.)

[P.S. Mon. p.m: The event will be webcast live -- here to register.]

The speaker is Carl Schramm, Kauffman President, followed by a panel discussion with Arthur C. Brooks (President, American Enterprise Institute: E.J. Dionne (Senior Fellow, Brookings, & WaPo columnist); Philip K. Howard (Chair, Common Good); George Priest (Director of the Olin Center at Yale Law School); and Brink Lindsey (Senior Scholar, Kauffman Foundation).

A preview, one suspects, can be found in a column Schramm wrote for the Huffington Post a few weeks ago, called “Messy Capitalism Drives Innovation — And Economic Growth”:

What legislators and policymakers must remember is that the messy process of firms starting, competing, failing, and growing (and, potentially, shrinking) is absolutely essential to achieving economic growth. This is what we call “messy capitalism” — economic growth and dynamism do not emerge from a neat process nor are they borne, like Athena from Zeus’ head, fully-formed in the shape of successful firms out of university laboratories.

Scale and growth, and their underlying corollaries of failure and shrinkage, can only be achieved through this messy process. Our institutions — government, large corporations, universities, and others — need to be willing to let this process proceed and accept that it cannot be dictated or controlled.

One hopes that some of those sold-out seats are occupied by government officials, because the National Economic Council, the Council of Economic Advisors, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy just released A Strategy for American Innovation (Feb. 2010), and it is decidedly a mixed bag. There are some institutional reform designed to facilitate the “messy process,” such as patent reform and intellectual property protection, and tax credits for research, but there is also a lot of pork and fad – “high speed rail,” “innovation hubs,” “clean energy,” yet more money for education, “open Internet” (aka Net Neutrality); calls for unspecified “breakthroughs.”  There is no discussion of the impact of the financial reform bill, health care, the EPA’s control of CO2, the FDA’s treatment of drug testing, or other serious issues.

So while the government has some of the right words, I doubt that it really has the tune right, and could learn from the Foundation’s focus on institutions as opposed to funds for the favored.