Gallup CEO lauds entrepreneurs

LINCOLN — America needs more entrepreneurs to restart its economic engine, which has sputtered to a halt after a quarter century of phenomenal growth, according to Jim Clifton, a Nebraska native who is CEO of the Gallup Organization.

Clifton will be the keynote speaker today at the 2010 Nebraska Summit on Entrepreneurship, sponsored by the University of Nebraska. About 450 people were expected to attend the event, being held at the Holiday Inn Downtown in Lincoln.

Thursday, Clifton described entrepreneurship as the key to the high-stakes economic situation the U.S. now faces.

“The answer lies within entrepreneurship,” he said. “We’ve got to create new business energy. New jobs aren’t sustainable unless they are created by customers and not by government. Without entrepreneurs, there is no tax base, without a tax base, we don’t have the entitlement programs Americans love.”

Clifton said many people don’t realize how much the U.S. economy has grown in the past 25 years, fueled in part by the build-out of the Internet.

“We grew so much faster than the rest of the world. Now that growth has stopped,” he said. “It’s like America got laid off.

“Americans don’t understand that unless we maintain that economic engine, where we invent and sell everything to the world, we can’t maintain our leadership in everything else.”

NU President J.B. Milliken said the conference illustrates the working relationship between university research and business.

“The University of Nebraska is committed to encouraging and facilitating the passion for entrepreneurship that is shared by people across Nebraska,” he said. “Business development and job growth depend on innovation an entrepreneurship, more so in today’s economy than ever.”

Clifton agreed.

“So goes the University of Nebraska, so goes job creation,” he said. “University researchers are the petri dish for so many business models and inventions.”

He said the success of NU’s proposed Innovation campus, a public-private research park being developed on the former state fairgrounds, will require an emphasis on entrepreneurship as well as innovation.

Clifton, 58, knows something about the topic. He helped parlay Selection Research Inc., the Lincoln survey company founded by his father, the late Don Clifton, into the Gallup Organization, which owns the international polling company founded by the late George Gallup. SRI purchased Gallup in 1988.

Gallup and his father were the researchers and innovators. Jim Clifton described himself as a “traveling salesman” who transformed the ideas into business.

“My father founded SRI, while I borrowed money to start the market research subsidiary,” he said. “That’s why I get put in the category of hardworking entrepreneur, even though I’ve been CEO here for 21 years and most people see me as a run-of-the-mill CEO.”

Contact the writer:

402-473-9581, leslie.reed@owh.com

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