Prying open global markets for American entrepreneurs

American start-ups are going global and Congress has a unique opportunity to help advance their journeys.

The Internet is democratizing access to the global marketplace, which was once reserved largely for multinational corporations. Today, a great idea, smart website and savvy media strategy can generate global demand for local goods and services from the launch of a new business. 

{mosads}This global opportunity brings unexpected challenges. Small businesses have to deal with the same issues as major multinationals when they trade and invest across borders – everything from tariff barriers and opaque customs procedures to protecting intellectual property and complying with privacy regulations on a global basis – but with significantly fewer resources. 

One way to help ease the global journeys of startups and small businesses is to rewrite trade rules for the digital age. The Obama Administration is in various stages of discussions that would result in new trade and investment partnerships aimed at simplifying rules, improving availability of information and modernizing legal and regulatory frameworks for anyone looking to engage in the global marketplace. 

Collectively, such efforts would improve access to and reduce the complexity of foreign markets for a new generation of global entrepreneurs in the Washington, DC region and beyond. 

Take Wireless Registry, which operates out of the District of Columbia-based 1776 incubator and serves as a registry for wireless names and identifiers for customers around the world. New commitments to improve the rules on e-commerce and financial services could help ensure that the company can participate effectively in the global digital marketplace and is not tripped up by worrying trends at fracturing the global Internet.

By simplifying customs regulations, lowering tariffs and improving the availability of basic information online, new trade rules could help emerging e-commerce companies such Hugh and Crye, an innovative, direct-to-consumer menswear retailer based at the Navy Yard in Southeast Washington, DC, meet global demand around the world. 

Ongoing trade talks could also benefit innovative startup Fenugreen both immediately and over the longer term. The company faces a prohibitively high tariff on its product – an innovative, patent-protected piece of paper called Freshpaper that you buy at Whole Foods that helps keep produce fresh for up to four times longer – in some markets. By lowering tariff barriers, trade agreements can help pry open foreign markets for Fenugreen’s unique product. 

Trade agreements could also help Fenugreen as it pursues a longer-term goal of building out global production and distribution relationships to be closer to their customers by providing improved investment protections and improving legal frameworks to help them protect their patented product.

Negotiations towards deals such as the Transpacific Partnership Agreement could also play an important role globally, knitting together innovative communities from Santiago to Washington to Singapore in more seamless, less complex business networks. Better global rules could improve the ability of entrepreneurs and established companies to collaborate on R&D and in supply chain networks. 

Recently the U.S. Senate took action to move Trade Promotion Authority, which would provide the President authority and guidance to rewrite trade rules to benefit the increasingly diverse set of stakeholders who stand to benefit from foreign markets. 

While the legislation itself does not modernize the rules, it provides the President critical tools to negotiate a good deal for the broad range of American innovators who are engaging in the global marketplace today. 

The challenge for the debate that now surrounds the legislation as it moves to the House of Representatives is that members of Congress will rarely hear from the entrepreneurs and innovators that it is poised to benefit. 

Colvin is executive director of the Global Innovation Forum at the National Foreign Trade Council.