The White House pushes entrepreneurship with help from Facebook, Intel and more

The White House has today announced a major new initiative to help stimulate economic growth and create jobs in the US by promoting entrepreneurship.

The Startup America Partnership is to be chaired by Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, and is enlisting top entrepreneurs, startup funders, CEOs, university presidents, foundations, and other leaders to help entrepreneurial companies develop.

Launch partners for the initiative include Intel, HP, IBM and Facebook. Among the companies’ commitments, Intel Capital will commit $200M of new investment in U.S. companies, while IBM will contribute $150 million this year to fund programs that promote entrepreneurs and new business opportunities.

HP is putting $4m into its existing HP Learning Initiative for Entrepreneurs education outreach program. Meanwhile, Facebook is launching a series of Startup Days around the US. These will consist of 12 to 15 events “designed to provide entrepreneurs with access to expertise, resources and engineers to help accelerate their businesses.”

Elsewhere, The Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship is teaming up with companies including Ernst & Young and Google to promote entrepreneurship to the next generation via a range of educational schemes.

Using funding from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Case Foundation, The Startup America Partnership is designed to act as “an independent private-sector alliance”, intended to “dramatically increase the development, prevalence and success of innovative, high-growth U.S. firms.”