Articles

If you live in a rural region suffering from poor broadband coverage, you might want to spread around this article to your leadership.

It demonstrates how a rural region in Southern Illinois has built the new infrastructure it needs to be competitive.

Read more.

You can learn more about Connect SI from it's web site.

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.

E-mail from the Governor's office in Idaho:

The Governor will be rolling out Project 60 in a more definitive and high-profile way on Thursday when he addresses the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce. It will be the Governor’s signature economic development initiative, embodying his core principle of Enhancing Economic Opportunity.
 
PROJECT 60: Governor Otter has set a goal of expanding the gross state product of Idaho from its current $51 billion to $60 billion by the time he leaves office. We are calling it “Project 60,” and it will be integrated into all that we do in terms of economic development and job creation.
 
  Important points to remember:

• Just because Idaho has fared somewhat better than most other states during the recent economic downturn, we are not resting on the laurels of our unprecedented 20 years of growth. Complacency is a recipe for disaster, so we are aggressively attacking our challenges on a number of fronts under the Project 60 banner. Think of it as a business plan for Idaho, around which we will be focusing many of our public policy initiatives.
• Part of that involves working with community and industry leaders throughout Idaho to complete public infrastructure projects that facilitate expansion. That includes improving our roads, highways and bridges and facilitating energy transmission.
• We also are working on recruitment of people with special skills, including engineers and computer scientists needed by companies looking to grow and expand.
• And we are working on a regional technology transfer protocol. Its goal is encouraging innovative new companies to take root and create jobs from the research being conducted at our universities and the Idaho National Laboratory.
• Finally, the weak dollar has provided an excellent platform from which to expand our international exports and our presence in the global marketplace. We are AGGRESSIVELY pursuing the international market on three fronts: foreign direct investment, such as that being made by French-owned AREVA; raising foreign investment capital for start-up of new innovation companies and support of growing companies; and expanding exports and trade, including recruitment of businesses from Canada and elsewhere for our available labor and very competitive operating costs.

Few states are as focused as Michigan in regenerating older downtowns. Michigan's Cool Cities initiative has gained nationwide attention.

In a companion program, Michigan has  focused on eliminating blight in some of its most devastated downtowns. This Cities of Promise initiative focuses on each cities: Benton Harbor, Detroit, Flint, Hamtramck, Highland Park, Muskegon Heights, Pontiac and Saginaw.

In addition, the state's Main Street program has launched a Cultural Economic Development program. In four communities, the state is providing support to encourage economic development and downtown revitalization through arts and culture.

Read more.

Here's an example of a community (Holland, MI) focusing its marketing and branding on attracting brainpower. The hook: quality neighborhoods. Read more.

The campaign highlights a couple of important factors that distinguish new approaches to economic development:

• The focus on attracting brainpower;
  
• The focus on telling stories to build a brand;
• The focus on quality, connected places.
  

In another indication of the shifting interest toward creating economic development incentives for attracting people (as oposed to companies), two young Ohio legislators have proposed a new tax incentive:

Under the legislation, college graduates who pledge to live in Ohio would earn a nonrefundable state income tax credit of up to $3,000 per year for up to 10 years. The idea was hatched Wednesday at a Statehouse news conference thrown by Rep. Josh Mandel, a 30-year-old Lyndhurst Republican, and Rep. Jay Goyal, a 27-year-old Mansfield Democrat.

Read more.

Here's a good commentary on innovation from one of the state leaders in Maine. She focuses on the importance of translating ideas into a practical polcy agenda.

She skates along the high points of a complex topic, but she is focusing on one of the core issues facing economic development: accelerating innovation.
Read more.

The public policy challenge, of course, involves transforming legacy economic and workforce development programs -- many of which are rooted in the 1930's -- into policies appropriate for an economy in which open innovation networks drive prosperity.

The Pollicy Challenge

Most of our economic development policies are geared toward an industrial recruitment model. Over twenty years, globalization has gradually made this strategy less productive...and largely obsolete.

Now we need policy strategies that more flexible approaches to 1) transforming education through innovation; 2) integrating education and workforce development with economic development and 3) accelerating innovation through open networks driven by regional strategies.

The Business Challenge

At the same time, busisses face their own set of challenges. Here's a good summary from a former top executive at IBM. Read more.

Ohio is trying to move its university system center stage in its economic transformation. Next week, the Chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents will be unveiling a new strategic plan for the state's 13 public universities  and 23 community colleges.

Here's an overview of what will be announced next week. 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.

Here is a good article on how Madison, Wisconsin is concentrating development downtown and providing the foundation for the growth of an IT cluster. The article highlights the importance of an urban research university in developing new clusters. Companies locate close to university campuses in order to connect a brainpower.

Technology stalwarts Google and Microsoft will open offices in the downtown area, primarily to tap into computing talent at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Google's engineering office will focus on hardware and software systems design, and the Microsoft's advanced development lab will concentrate on database research.

Read more.

Last weekend, I spent three days with 25 economic development professionals from around the country at the Edward Lowe Foundation in Michigan.

We assembled as the first class of students learning about the disciplines of Economic Gardening. For those of you who are not familiar with Economic Gardening, it is a strategy and set of tools developed in the Littleton, Colorado by Chris Gibbons and his team working for the City of Littleton.

With the support of the Lowe Foundation, Chris has been developing a curriculum to teach Economic Gardening to local economic developers.

This approach focuses on strengthening innovation and entrepreneurship within a local economy by focusing carefully on the needs and strategic options of entrepreneurs and growth-oriented companies. The underlying concepts are critically important because they move our thinking from industrial, hierarchical models to network-based, biological models of the economy.

You can learn more about Economic Gardening from the City of Littleton website and from a recent chapter in an SBA report to the President that is available here.  The Lowe Foundation has also been supporting my work in developing new network-based models of economic and workforce development.

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.