Articles

A group  of communities south of Chicago are moving ahead with an intriguing strategy: a "Green Time Zone" for passenger rail, cargo facilities and green manufacturing. The strategy represents a collaboration among the South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association, the Chicago Southland Economic Development Corp. and the Center for Neighborhood Technology.

Check out the Chicago Southland Economic Development Corp. for details. Click on the map for a larger view.

Read more.

At their best, newspapers can provide a valuable contribution to a region's economic future. By framing the challenges and opportunities ahead, a newspaper can help shape strategies.

In an open economy of networks, strategy is about aligning perceptions, focusing energies and promoting collaboration. Here's a good example of a newspaper working to shape the strategic framework for a region.

• Can St. Louis compete?
• Can St. Louis compete? Finding a niche
• Can St. Louis compete? Time to act is now
  
• St. Louis needs to embrace immigration
• People, not firms, can turn economy around
• It seems we mostly agree on how we can thrive
  

Notre Dame -- like many private universities -- has been relatively slow to embrace the emerging role of universities as drivers in regional economic transformation.  But the university is catching up. Innovation Park at Notre Dame launched late last year with the promise of tighter connections between the university and the regional economy.  Read more.

Notre Dame's investments are part of a broader strategy in South Bend to develop a more entrepreneurial and innovation-led economy. The city has also invested in Ignition Park, a facility at the old Studebaker plant.

In addition to Innovation Park, Notre Dame has invested in a new engineering facility. Here's a good article that summarizes how Notre Dame has shifted its focus. Read more.

None of these efforts will work as stand alone investments. That's the core message of this article. 

New York's tech scene, dubbed Silicon Alley, is thriving amidst the rubble of the Wall Street meltdown (and the recession it triggered).

Here's an update.

In July 2009, NYC's Mayor Bloomberg announced a new strategy for the city to develop digital media. It's a booming worldwide market. Last week, a conference in Shanghai highlighted the growth opportunities emerging in the dawning of an era of ever expanding digital pipes. Read more.

Peoria, Illinois is reinventing itself in part through Peoria NEXT, an incubator founded in 2007.

It's interesting to see how the local paper is handling the failure of one of the incubator's keystone companies. Rather than dwell on the company bankruptcy, the local papers focused on the newer companies are continuing to sprout within the incubator. Read more.

This is all part of the important transition in these older economies to take the sting out of business failure. In older industrial economies of culture grew in which business failure triggered both shame and shunning.

Incubators can help change this dynamic. Incubator strategies are also playing a critical role in older industrial cities like Kokomo, Kalamazoo and Youngstown.

Both Albany, New York and Lowell, Massachusetts are investing in nanotechnology as a new foundation for their economy. Last week couple of articles appeared which highlight these efforts.

In Albany, researchers are reaching out to shopping malls to inform local residents of the potential of nanotechnology. Read more.

This is a smart communications strategy, because without continuous promotion developments in nanotechnology can feed from the public's perception.

That may have happened in Lowell. The high expectations of nanotechnology appear to have faded from the public's view. Yet, the technology continues to evolve quickly, and new business opportunities and companies are continuing to form. Read more.

If you're interested in learning some background on nanotechnology, I suggest the book, "The Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business."

Looking at how other countries are coping with the fundamental shifts taking place in the world economy often provides a helpful perspective for civic leaders in US regions.

Last week, Malaysia's government announced a new economic policy, which it calls the New Economic Model.
The table of contents is framed around key strategic questions:

• Where are we?
• What's happening around us?
• Which advantages do we have?
• Where do we want to be?
• How do we get there?

(This structure provides clarity to the document, a clarity that is often missing in economic and workforce strategy documents in the U.S.)

A good strategy tells a good story. Clearly, the government hopes with the New Economic Model to frame a different type of narrative about the country's future.

The document is also framed around a good graphic that outlines how economic development involves the balancing of different dimensions: high incomes; inclusiveness; and sustainability. (The term "rakyat" means people.)

I find this graphic a bit more accessible and understandable than the "triple bottom line" graphics of people, planet and profit. (See this example.)

You can download a copy of the Malaysia strategy document here. You can read more about the strategy here.

After a hiatus of several months, I'm relaunching EDPro weblog as a place where practitioners can can keep track of the latest in economic and workforce development.

About a year ago, I began a series of presentations and workshops on new approaches to economic and workforce development. These presentations focused on how we can accelerate collaboration and innovation in our regional economies. As the map above shows you, I've been all over the United States. In the coming months, my travel continues, as practitioners learn about these new approaches.

In April, I'll be talking with practitioners form the rural Midwest in Madison, WI; a rural region in central Illinois;a statewide conference of workforce development professionals in California; a 20 country region in Illinois, Kentucky and Indiana; and a regional group in Florida coping with the end of the space shuttle program.

Both the Purdue Center for Regional Development and the Edward Lowe Foundation have promoted my work, and I deeply appreciate their support. They have each provided me the space I have needed to develop and implement these new approaches to economic and workforce development.

Not surprisingly, people are increasingly impatient with traditional approaches to economic and workforce development. Bluntly, they don't work very well.

Over on my other weblog, edmorrison.com, I've been putting up some of my latest thinking in how we can promote open innovation and implement effective strategies within loosely joined networks.

We developed and deployed a lot of these new approaches in Indiana during our implementation of the Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development (WIRED) initiative. With these new approaches, we caught the eye of the US Department of Labor -- Employment and Training Administration. DOLETA sent me around to a number of regions around the country to explain how strategic doing works. These workshops led to still other presentations and workshops. The press of these events caused me to drop my work on EDPro.

Now it's time to pick up the ball and relaunch EDPro.

I will focus my postings on EDPro weblog on new developments I see throughout the country. Rather than simply post these developments, I'll try to provide some context for you. I will explain why I think these new developments are noteworthy.

If you want some additional information and insight on strategic doing, please keep track of postings on edmorrison.com. You can also check out some videos on  the strategic doing channel on Vimeo.

Over a year ago, I remember reading an article in the Atlantic magazine on the demographic shifts that were taking place across the country. The article explored how the outer reaches of suburban development were likely to become the next slum, while older urban areas could be experiencing a renaissance. These outer reaches of suburban development are characterized by large lot homes and often shoddy construction.

The article came to mind as I read how developers are converting old warehouses into the incubator space in Greenville, South Carolina. Read more. 

If you're it just did in the Atlantic article, I dug it out here.  The forecast for the outer reaches of suburbia are not promising:

Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, has looked carefully at trends in American demographics, construction, house prices, and consumer preferences. In 2006, using recent consumer research, housing supply data, and population growth rates, he modeled future demand for various types of housing. The results were bracing: Nelson forecasts a likely surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (houses built on a sixth of an acre or more) by 2025—that’s roughly 40 percent of the large-lot homes in existence today.

For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.

At the same time, real estate prices in some urban centers are commanding a premium:

Pent-up demand for urban living is evident in housing prices. Twenty years ago, urban housing was a bargain in most central cities. Today, it carries an enormous price premium. Per square foot, urban residential neighborhood space goes for 40 percent to 200 percent more than traditional suburban space in areas as diverse as New York City; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; and Washington, D.C.

 Now take a look at the newly developed Innovation Center in Greenville:

Most of the companies that have leased space in the building, or plan to, are members of the Greenville Chamber of Commerce's Next group for technology entrepreneurs. They have long wanted to share office space under the theory it would foster collaboration and creativity.

Developer Bob Hughes of Greenville designed the Next Innovation Center with the techie crowd in mind. Amenities include skylights over stained concrete floors, a center atrium with grand staircase, Wii rooms for relaxation, a 50-megabit Internet pipe and digital signage in the lobby that tenants can program.

The  real estate demands of knowledge-based businesses and the entrepreneurs who run them are fundamentally different. EDPros will need to think about how to create innovation "hotspots" within their communities and regions. Close proximity to a college or university will help.

So, for example, the revival of Youngstown, Ohio is taking place around the Youngstown Business Incubator.  In Kokomo, Inventrek, located in a converted office building, is the epicenter for new development being planned by the newly launched Kokomo Development Alliance. 

Some interesting networks are forming in southern Wisconsin around Inventors and Entrepreneurs Clubs.  They represent an important strategy in building networks. Regular programs on interesting topics draw out people within a region who share common interests.

Through these regular civic forums, EDPros can begin developing the networks needed to support entrepreneurs and innovation.  From this article, you can see that the organizers of these forums pay careful attention to the content of their sessions. They make sure that the speakers invited focus on the needs of their local entrepreneurs. Meetings are held throughout the region to make them convenient.

In addition, you'll notice that  the organizers focus on a interstate perspective. They are not interested only in southwestern Wisconsin. They extend their reach to Northern Illinois and eastern Iowa. Read more. You can visit their website here.

In an interesting experiment, the US Economic Development Administration is investing in upstate New York on a strategy to build what I would call a "civic" infrastructure to attract  and retain brainpower. Usually, we don't associate the EDA with these types of strategies. Normally, EDA invests in physical infrastructure.

However, with the leadership of Cornell University and its extension program, the EDA is investing in the connectivity needed to build regional leadership.  The pilot project connects to Southern tier cities, Elmira and Olean, which are about 110 miles apart.

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The project is an outgrowth of an interesting regional initiative called Pipeline 4 Progress.  According to press reports,

The project will offer the communities several training opportunities, including entrepreneurship and enterprise development, green industry, leadership development, grant writing, as well as understanding and using demographics. The project will also seek to link communities together through a rural learning network and an enterprise/entrepreneurial support network.

Here's some  additional background on the project. Read more.

In mid-July, a federal court judge through a huge monkey wrench into the economic developer strategies of Atlanta and Georgia. The judge ruled that Georgia had no legal right to withdraw drinking water from Lake Lanier.

Atlanta's continuous growth as soon as that available drinking water could be easily drawn from Lake Lanier. Now that assumption has been called into question.

The lake currently provides drinking water for 3.5 million citizens in Atlanta. The judge held that Congress never authorized water supply has a purpose for damning the Chattahoochee River to create a reservoir.

The judge made clear that Congress must give its approval to the use of Lake Lanier for anything other than power generation, flood control or navigation. The judge gave Georgia, Florida and Alabama three years to work out a water sharing agreement. Without a deal, the judge could order the Corps of Engineers to reduce water withdrawals from the lake to levels existing in the 1970s.

During the August congressional recess, the Georgia congressional delegation met with the governor to plot a strategy. Read more. Based on some early press reports, the controversy could get uglier.

(Global water shortages are going to become an increasing fact of life over the next couple of decades.  Last spring, the United Nations  released the World Water Development Report which projected  that two thirds of the world could be facing water shortages by 2025.)