Eric Ries has a new message for America’s budding businesses: Go lean. The 32-year-old Silicon Valley executive is the founder of Lean Startup, a rising movement that’s sweeping the business world with what might be called the world’s first startup philosophy. And people are paying attention.

Ries’ forthcoming book, THE LEAN STARTUP, is anticipated to be a bestseller and is already among Amazon’s top 100 in the management category months before its release.

Meanwhile, ultra-successful companies like Groupon and Dropbox are putting Ries’ ideas to work to remarkable effect, and the likes of Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, and Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit, joined Ries as keynote speakers at Lean Startup’s 2nd Annual Startup Lessons Learned Conference on May 23rd in San Francisco.

But for Ries, who co-founded IMVU, a social entertainment company with 40 million users and $3 million in monthly revenue, the real barometer of Lean Startup’s success are the 100,000-plus people who have created their own “Lean Startup Meetups” in cities around the world. At the Meetups, entrepreneurs gather to apply Ries’ approach to their own business projects, posting videos, projects, and results on Ries’ http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/.

“Startups are the lifeblood of the American economy,” says Ries, “In the past two decades, they have accounted for nearly all the net job growth in our country.”

It’s a surprising realization: American job growth is no longer driven by steelworks and car plants, as it once was, but by innovation and entrepreneurship. Today’s biggest job-driving companies – Google, Yahoo, Intel, eBay – were born as startups. As America’s economy continues to shift, jobs and growth will depend on startups to an even greater extent.

This shift has put the spot light on Reis who has caught the attention of President Obama who asked the U.S. Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra to specifically ask Ries to advise on ways the government can successfully create entrepreneurship initiatives.

What this also means to Ries is that revitalizing the U.S. economy is really about maximizing every American startup’s chances for success. Lean Startup is the first business movement to do exactly this, and it’s doing it with a surprising degree of success – even for a startup.