Since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has reinvented itself as a bit of an entrepreneurial hub, replete with incubators and accelerators and an Entrepreneur Week now in its fourth year that draws visitors from Google, Stanford, and venture capital firms. It has homegrown success stories like the Receivables Exchange and Naked Pizza that now have national profiles.

The groundwork for building a startup community in the Crescent City began long before Katrina put it in the spotlight. Part of the effort originated in 1999, when New Orleans native Tim Williamson met at a bar with four other entrepreneurs to discuss ways to counter the brain drain that began in the city in the 1980s. The tech boom of the 1990s had largely missed New Orleans, Williamson says, and most people with good business ideas left the city because they encountered an insular business community with little support for new entrepreneurs. Williams soon co-founded the Idea Village, a decade-old nonprofit intended to change that. His question: "How do you make entrepreneurship part of your culture?"

It's a question cities across the country are trying to answer. From New York to Detroit to Cleveland, business and political leaders see high-growth entrepreneurship as a salve for unemployment and decay, especially in areas where manufacturing or other industry has disappeared. Smaller cities are seduced by the prospect of becoming the next Boulder or Austin, centers of technology and growing industries that draw young, educated workers and high-paying jobs.

"I believe this can happen anywhere," Williamson said in an interview yesterday. That's not to say it's easy, or that every plan to make Akron or Omaha into a startup center is going to work. Williamson says that cities plunk down big sums and try to orchestrate entrepreneurial revivals from the top down are likely to fail. Local entrepreneurs need to lead the effort and build relationships in different networks throughout the city. "It takes time. It doesn't take money," he says. "Lack of money is good, in a sense." That forces communities to develop local support for entrepreneurs organically, rather than, for example, building a shiny new incubator building.

The job's not done. New Orleans still doesn't have the sophisticated investors that help make Boulder and Austin attractive places to start companies. Williamson says no venture capital firm has an office in the city, and many of the angel investors are funding companies for the first time. But more than a decade's work has created an environment more welcoming to innovators and entrepreneurs. It's welcoming enough that iSeatz, a homegrown tech company that left for New York after Katrina, moved its headquarters back to NOLA in 2007. "There's a belief now that New Orleans is a great, supportive environment," Williamson says. "People don't leave when they get funded."

The government's top official charged with advocating for small business is now a member of the White House cabinet, President Obama announced today.

Along with the move, Obama asked Congress for authority to shuffle the executive branch's org chart, consolidating six agencies (including the Small Business Administration) that deal with trade and commerce.

SBA Administrator Karen Mills will join the cabinet, meeting with the president alongside the secretaries of Treasury, Labor, Defense, and other executive departments. The move requires no approval from Congress, according to SBA spokeswoman Hayley Meadvin.

Obama also asked Congress to give him the power to merge the following agencies:

• The core business and trade functions of the Commerce Department
• U.S. Trade Representative
• Export-Import Bank
• Overseas Private Investment Corp
• Trade and Development Agency
• Small Business Administration

The new agency would encompass four areas: trade and investment; small business and economic development; technology and innovation (including the Patent and Trademark Office); and statistics (bringing together the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

"By doing this we will serve businesses, especially small businesses, much better," said Jeff Zients, deputy director at the Office of Management and Budget who also holds the title of federal chief performance officer. "This consolidated department will have one website, one telephone number, and one mission ... to make it much easier for small businesses and help American businesses succeed," he told reporters on a conference call today.

The move is more symbolic than substantial, says Bob Litan, who worked in the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton Administration and is now vice-president for Research and Policy at the Kauffman Foundation. "Government mergers are no better than corporate mergers," he says. Promises that consolidation will make the organization more efficient rarely materialize in the private sector and probably won't in this case either, Litan says. He says Congress is unlikely to give Obama the authority to make the changes anyway. "The major reason [for the announcement] is for them to have the symbolic effort to show that they're trying to save taxpayer money and streamline the government."

It's not clear what the new department would be called, or who would lead it. The Secretary of Commerce, John Bryson, is already a cabinet member, as is the U.S. Trade Representative, Ron Kirk.

The move to streamline bureaucracy follows a report last year from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office that detailing how different arms of the government duplicate efforts. For example, there are 80 programs across four agencies that deal with economic development.

The consolidation will save $3 billion over 10 years and eliminate 1,000 to 2,000 jobs through attrition, Zients said.

We're kicking off our search for businesses to profile in our fourth annual roundup of America's most promising social entrepreneurs. The idea is to find and report on business ventures that advance a social or environmental mission and aim to turn a profit. We're asking readers to suggest candidates using the form at the bottom of this post.

Interest in social enterprise has grown in recent years. The movement has given rise to a slew of investors, incubators, networking groups, and other organizations dedicated to helping mission-driven entrepreneurs succeed. Policymakers, too, are recognizing approaches that combine business methods with social missions. Seven states have passed laws creating new legal structures that give companies more leeway to consider social and environmental missions over financial returns.

While definitions of social entrepreneurship vary, for purposes of this roundup, we are searching for for-profit, scalable companies that exist to solve societal problems. We want businesses with social missions baked into their operations, not tacked on as extras. We want companies that can demonstrate results, both in the marketplace and in their missions. That means we'll only consider companies that will disclose their annual revenues. We're seeking for-profit companies based in the U.S., doing business here or abroad, that meet these criteria.

Submit your company or another you know of using the form below. We'll take suggestions through Feb. 9. Know that there is no need to submit the same company more than once. This spring, we'll post profiles of the 25 our reporters and editors find most promising. Then we'll ask you to vote for the one you find most promising, and announce the five that get the most votes. (For a look at last year's roundup, flip through this slide show.)

(Photographer: Thomas Barwick/Getty Images)

Steve Case (center) kicked off the Startup America Partnership at the White House last January.

Steve Case and Scott Case dropped by the Bloomberg offices in New York yesterday afternoon to talk up their Startup America Partnership as it nears its one-year anniversary. (The Cases are unrelated: Steve is best known as co-founder of AOL (AOL); Scott as founding chief technology officer of Priceline (PCLN).) They've been leading a push to get Corporate America and government policymakers to better understand the difference between small businesses and startups aiming for exponential growth--and better support the latter.

Grasping the nuance is crucial, Steve says, because "if you care about the economy...the place to focus is high-growth companies." He notes that Kauffman Foundation data show 40 million jobs were created in the last three decades by these high-growth companies, "which they say accounts for all the net job creation." There's one big problem, though, he adds. "In the last five years the number of new startups is down 23 percent. If it had stayed at the same level, we'd have two million more jobs in the economy."

Steve explains startups' job-creating promise isn't always clear to policymakers in Washington, D.C.: "[They] don't differentiate between big business (Fortune 500), small business (Main Street America, restaurants, dry cleaners, so forth), and high-growth companies. Obviously, big companies account for a lot of jobs; they're important. Small business account for a lot of jobs; they're important. But it's these high-growth companies that account for all the net job growth."

Beyond this push for enlightenment, the Cases want the Startup America initiative to serve as a practical tool for entrepreneurs who can benefit from private sector largesse (free legal and accounting services, for example), industry expertise, and professional connections.

While only about 2,200 startups have signed up to use the resources available through Startup America's site, Scott says corporations including Dell, Google, and Microsoft have pledged about $1.2 billion in services for participating companies. He aims to get 100,000 startups to sign up by April by prodding supporters to recruit from within their own circles and corporate partners to push their customers to join. He estimates there are 1.5 million to 1.8 million U.S. companies that fit within the high-growth rubric that could benefit.

By the summer, Scott wants to release data showing how participants are faring. For now, though, he says he's most concerned with helping founders and prompting would-be supporters to recognize that growth companies are a different breed.

"At the personal level, [entrepreneurs running high-potential ventures] are different people; they have a different mindset...[they] think that they're going to disrupt the world or create a whole new market," says Scott. "But that process, that churning out there in the unknown is what creates these blockbuster high-growth companies that pop out of seemingly nowhere. We need more of that in this country. And we need everybody that's around those companies to recognize them, because that's where huge opportunity lies."

Photographer: Charles Dharapak/AP

Congress's failure to extend the 2 percent payroll tax cut expiring at the end of this year means employers will likely have to start withholding more money Jan. 1. Payroll providers told Bloomberg News that changing the rate for a full-year is pretty simple, while putting in place a two-month extension (which the Senate, but not the House, approved) is somewhat trickier. Workers who will watch their take-home pay shrink will obviously suffer the most from the squabble. Small companies that don't outsource their payroll will face some inconveniences as well. Bloomberg's Richard Rubin reports:

Smaller businesses that use off-the-shelf software or prepare pay stubs by hand would also face difficulty complying with late changes.

"It's a complication in the employer's life and I think the smaller employers are the ones who are going to feel the confusion more directly," said Abe Schneier, a senior technical manager at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants in Washington.

People who work for themselves and pay both the employer and employee sides of the tax will have trouble ensuring they make the correct quarterly estimated tax payments, he said.

Schneier said he thought that large payroll providers would face complications, though would largely be able to manage the changes.

For anyone tallying Congressional ironies, the same House Republicans who so often profess to love small business and tax cuts scuttled the compromise to extend the tax cut that both parties in the Senate agreed to last week. In doing so, they may have created a payroll headache for Main Street employers. Congress's approval rating this month: a record low 11 percent.