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Two hundred civic leaders in Dayton met this week to review their strategic options.The summit focused on the connection of education to economic development.

In the Product Innovation and Commercialization group, Ireland native Eugene Peden gave a fiery speech comparing Dayton to his homeland.

“I look at this region, and I see a great parallel to Ireland,” said Peden, vice president of operations at PECO II, a telecommunications power equipment and service provider.

Peden said like the Dayton region, Ireland was heavily dependant on the manufacturing industry, but has emerged as one of the fasted growing economies in the world because of a strong educational system.

The strong educational system allowed the country to change gears and flourish in emerging industries, which is exactly the point the summit was hoping to make with regional leaders.

“Be afraid, be very afraid, but let’s have that fear energize us,” Peden said.

Wise advice. Read more.

Yesterday, I spent the day with a team of researchers and practitioners from Indiana University, the Purdue Center for Regional Development, and the University of Missouri.

We have teamed with two private companies, Strategic Development Group and Economic Modeling Specialists.

Together, we are woprking on a new set of tools for regions to accelerate their economies through innovation. Yesterday, we viewed the tools together, and it was quite exciting to see how these tools are evolving.

They should be ready for prime time in a few months. We'll preview them to the economic development community at the Economic Development Institute's session in Indianapolis in December.

The boundaries of economic development are shifting.

The increasingly important role of young professionals in a regional economy represents a prime example. In the past, young professionals had almost no voice in a region's economic development strategy.

Now, however, young professionals are playing an increasingly important role in providing leadership as the economy shifts toward a new set of important economic drivers: networks, creativity, innovation.

Here is an example from Chattanooga. The nonprofit organization CreateHere is pushing out the frontiers of economic development in that city. Read more.

Connecting podcasting  with economic development is relatively new. increasingly, though, EDPros will have to experiment with different ways of getting messages to different audiences. Over the past several months, I've been working on a number of initiatives to try to experiment with new Web 2.0 platforms, low-cost video and audio streaming, and simply capturing events with audio files.

Virginia Beach is starting to experiment with a regular podcast. You can learn more about what they're doing from this article. You can download their podcasts through iTunes.

A first impression: the primary audience for a podcast for economic development is probably local. In other words, you're trying to keep people informed of your economic developer strategy, as well as important event information. My guess is that podcasts are not going to be all that successful in marketing a community.

Here some basics on podcasting.

One of the ways to build a critical mass of civic leaders needed to transform an economy is to take them on a field trip. These leadership visits serve a number of important purposes. First, they build relationships among your leadership team. Second, they are a fast way to learn. Finally, leadership visits open new possibilities.

That is exactly what's happened in a recent leadership visit in which a group from Jackson, Mississippi traveled to Little Rock, Arkansas to gain some insights into how to transform a downtown.  Read more.

In Southern Illinois, Benton and West Frankfort are only 8 miles apart. Yet they do not collaborate on economic development. Until now. The possibility of a new fiber-optic network is expanding the opportunities to collaborate between these two small Illinois communities.

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And that's the point. When you're trying to build collaboration, focus on a handful of different opportunities. Push for some results as quickly as possible. Regional collaboration sounds great in theory, but it only works in practice.

If you're interested in learning more about broadband deployment in rural communities, you might want to check out the ConnectSI website here.

You can read more about the collaboration emerging in Southern Illinois from this article.

Here's an interesting idea out of Kentucky: employer roundtables. With the State and the University of Kentucky as partners, the Roundtable meets to develop strategies that simultaneously benefit employers and employees.

"Their goal is to help Kentucky's employers become 'employer-of-choice' organizations. They are equally interested in the individual workplace as they are in assuring Kentucky's ability to court and secure viable businesses and talent from around the world," said Personnel Cabinet Secretary Nikki Jackson. 

You can read more about the Roundtable here and visit their web site here.

When I think of enlightened newspapers whose editors understand the dynamics of regional economic development, I think of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the St. Peteresburgh Times, the Toledo Blade. The Shreveport Times does not come to mind. Until now, perhaps. 

This Sunday Shreveport Times has an uncommonly good editorial on the dynamics of reginal economic development. Read more.
In the old industrial economy purposeful conversation about economic strategy was often dismissed as "just talk", a distraction, a waste of time.

The economy of networks is far more ambiguous and complex. Purposeful conversation becomes essential to making sense of emerging trends, new opportunities, hidden risks.

That's in part wy communities and regions with a vibrant civic life will be more competitive in the years ahead. They will learn faster. Diverse viewpoints brought together by trusted civic leaders will lead to new insights and faster responses.

Here's a white paper on Strategic Doing. We've also launched a new web site on Strategic Doing, where we will be collecting stories, tools and insights into how to do strategy in open networks.

Just got back from Workforce Innovations, the largest gathering of workforce development professionals in the country. With our partner, Near Time, and the Department of Labor, I participated in the launch of Innovating Networks.

Innovating Networks introduces Web 2.0 technologies to economic and workforce development professionals.

The Web 2.0 changes everything because, for the first time, anyone can leverage the interactive power of the Internet. I've included a number of videos below to give you a sense of the possibilities.

Web 2.0, of course, creates new oppportunities for building innovating networks -- clusters -- within regional economies. (In a separate post, I'll give you a briefing on what I've been doing to launch a water technology cluster in SE Wisconsin.)

The new access to a powerful Internet also challenges us to come up with new appraoches to strategy. Strategic planning was developed by large multi-divisional corporations. It works well in a command and control environment. But the process does not work well in a network. We need new practices. That's what strategic doing is all about.You can download a white paper on strategic doing attached to this post.

You can also go through the slides from my Strategic Doing workshop here.

Here's a video overview on Web 2.0.

Here's an explanation of a blog.

Here's an explanation of the power of networks and social networks. (Innovating Networks has some elements of social networking, because it makes the "people network" of economic and workforce development more visisble.)

Here's an explaination of a wiki. Innovating Networks integrates wikis with blogs in an easy to use platform.

Here's an explanation of an RSS feed, another Web 2.0 technology. RSS feeds  help you filter information quickly. Near Time's platform integrates these technologies so that you can keep up with news more easily.

Next week at Workforce Innovations, I'll be releasing a white paper on open innovation models of economic development and workforce development. I've attached a copy.

I will also be releasing a white paper on Innovating Networks. I've attached a copy of that one, as well.

There will be a third one on Strategic Doing for a session I am conducting on that topic. It's not quite ready yet. I'll post it here shortly.

Strategic Doing is a set of principles, practices and disciplines for implementing strategy in a network. Old models of strategic planning were designed for hierarchical organizations, and they do not work well.  Strategic Doing represents the alternative.

(All this material is distributed under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License. That means you are free to distribute and modify anything you see in the white paper for commercial or noncommercial purposes. You do not need permission. Just tell people where you got it.)

One of the major challenges we face in the years ahead will be integrating education, economic development and workforce development. The old federal programs-- many of them stretching back to the 1930's -- create turf in our regions.Defending this turf has not only wasted resources. It has also kept us from seeing new opportunities that are fast emerging for innovation.

Next week, at Workforce Innovations, a group of us will be launching Innovating Networks, a new collaborative web site. 

Innovating Networks is an online community of workforce development professionals and economic development practitioners.  This collaborative web site provides an opportunity to share best practices, success stories and all types of information using Web 2.0 tools while networking and interacting with professionals and practitioners from across the country. It's a promising initiative to bridge the divide among education, economic development and workforce development professionals. I've been working on this initiative with our Web 2.0 technology partner, Near-Time.

I-Open (the Institute for Open Economic Networks) is the non-profit spin-out organization I formed with colleagues from the Center for Regional Economic Issues at Case Western Reserve University. Near-Time and I-Open have been collaborating on a number of promising approaches to support "strategic doing" (how you do strategy in a network), Open Source Economic Development and Open Source Workforce Development.

I'll be reporting from Workforce Innovations in New Orleans next week.