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For the past nine months or so, I've been keeping my eye on an interesting initiative coming out of Collier County, Florida. That's where Naples is located.  Economic development in Florida faces many of the same deep transformations confronting older industrial states like Michigan. In Florida, real estate development drove strategies.

Now, it has become increasingly clear that regional economies in Florida must diversify.  In 2007, housing prices in Florida began slipping after years of strong growth. Last year, it was cleared almost everyone that Florida's boom had turned to bust.

Late last year, the Economic Development Council of Collier County launched Project Innovation to diversify the economy. You can get a sense of the depth and breadth of this initiative by downloading an overview of their strategy.   In a commentary this month, the chairman of Project Innovation assesses their progress.

The first order of summer work divided the organizations into six working groups, one dedicated to each of the drivers to begin to identify measurable goals. These goals will advance innovation, economic and environmental diversification and sense of place. The means of evaluating each goal’s ability to create the positive change are being incorporated into the plan.

To qualify, the goal must serve a quantifiable role in driving prosperity and supporting innovation at levels catalytic to achieve sustainability and allow current and future generations of our community to thrive.

The process of refining the goals and the means of measuring them has been completed, and the endorsers are now progressing to the second order of business: charting existing and identifying new community projects that will help achieve these goals. Through consensus-building, creativity and collaboration of all the endorser organizations and the community, a specific, actionable blueprint for building a healthy economic foundation is beginning to emerge. As it is implemented, it will create a culture that will attract high-wage businesses and an environment that will support world-class employees.

Underserved neighborhoods in larger cities, as well as some smaller cities, are facing difficulties applying for stimulus funds to build out their broadband networks. The problem comes in the way in which the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) defines an "underserved area", eligible for funding.

Over the weekend, I worked on a proposal for a multicounty region in Minnesota. Clearly a rural region, this applicant easily fit the definition of an "underserved area". Not so, though, for other areas of the country in which broadband coverage is spotty. This article from Business Week explains the situation. Read more.

Increasingly, we're seeing ecnomic development efforts focus on a prmising new frontier: students. Here are a couple of examples. 

• In Michigan, a student-led incubator is part of a broader regional strategy to stimulate "growth from within". They are developing not just one program, but a student-centered ecosystem to support new businesses. Read more. 
• At the University of Missouri, a team of students recently entered a iPhone app competition sponsored by Apple. The college newspaper promoted their success. Read more . 

As these types of initiatives proliferate, the resistance within the university to connecting with the business community will inevitably weaken. Now, across college campuses, you see younger faculty embracing the rapidly emerging university role in innovation. 

Milwaukee 7 has launched an impressive water cluster, based on its strength in providing water to process industries like paper and beer. The region's leaders are looking at their industrial strengths in a new light. They are repositioning their assets by using collaboration. 

And that's the important point. Regional economic development strategies should start with a mapping of assets. For an introduction, see the Council on Competitiveness report on mapping regional assets. 

But asset mapping is not simply compiling a list. The real value of asset mapping comes when you start to explore connections among assets and what new opportunities these connections create. 

Other strengths are emerging in the M7 region. Here's a good review of the regional strengths in battery technology. Read more. In Indiana, we have followed a similar strategy of linking together our industrial assets in new ways. That led us to form the Indiana Energy Systems Network. 

For the past couple of years, I have been watching the progress of the Thrive region of 8 counties around Madison, Wisconsin. I like what I see. They started out by building a good foundation. Like the West Michigan Strategic Alliance, the Thrive region applied one of the most important lessons of collaboration: go slow to go fast.

That is, spend time building trust within a core group of partners. Only then can you scale a network. In our region in North Central Indiana, we took nearly a year to slowly build trust within our core group.

This week, a couple of the leaders from the Thrive region outlined the importance of collaboration. Read more.

You can also visit the website here.

The Thrive region started with a set of principles. That makes a lot of sense when trust levels are relatively high. When they're not, you're better off focusing on small collaborative steps. People learn to trust each other as they work together on projects. In a region with low trust -- like North Central Indiana -- you're probably better off starting on small collaborative projects. As momentum builds, you can turn toward outlining a set of principles that make sense.  After three years of work, we are heading in this direction with a new Regional Leadership Alliance based in Kokomo.

The West Michigan Alliance took another tact. They focused its early efforts on building regional awareness. Take a look at their book, The Common Framework, that they produced.

About a week or so ago, the New Economy Task Force of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce released a new strategy that made it to the pages of the New York Times. Read more.

One of the main themes of the article highlights how cities are moving away from traditional and expensive recruitment programs to nurture growth from within.  

The Atlanta report also highlights how EDPros  our becoming more sophisticated in their understanding of rapidly evolving markets. As we move from a focus on commodity-based manufacturing and cost-driven competition and toward innovation, EDPros need a more detailed (the chamber executives use the term, "granular") understanding of their economy.

You can download a copy of the presentation released by the chamber's consultants here.

In the mid-1980s, the visionary chairman of Control Data Corporation based in Minneapolis, William Norris, founded the Midwest Technology Development Institute. Through expanded collaboration, he felt, the region could accelerate innovation and technology development.

He also promoted the idea that the Midwest region should develop its own global ties. In effect, he encouraged regions to develop their own foreign economic policies. I remember distinctly as a legislative assistant on Capitol Hill reading one of Norris' papers in which he recommended that the midwest states form their own economic alliance with Japan. Constitutional issues notwithstanding, Norris was a big thinker and years ahead of his time.

What's left of his Institute sits in boxes at the University of Minnesota. Nevertheless, we are starting to see regions follow the pathway Norris recommended. Here's an example.

Later this month, the second annual Southeastern United States–Canadian Provinces Alliance Conference will be held in Nova Scotia.  Representatives from six Southeastern states and seven Canadian provinces will meet and discuss stronger trade and technology ties. You can read more from the press release. Or you can visit the website.

I think Norris was right the regions will begin heading down this path or aggressively in the years ahead. As regions become a key unit of global competition, regional  governance will become more stable. As that happens, we will see more region to region collaboration.

It's not surprising that the southeastern states are moving in this direction. Ever since the mid-1960s, Southern states have held quadrant of discussions around economic development issues. The Southern Growth Policies Board has served as a catalyst for many of these discussions.

The Midwest states are farther behind. Despite a number of different efforts to build collaborations across state lines, none of these efforts have been particularly successful (except, perhaps, initiatives focused on the Great Lakes). Now however were starting to see more collaboration taking place in the Midwest.

In the Northwest, we see regional collaboration crossing into Canada. Again, as governance becomes more stable within these regions, we can expect more ambitious alliances to form.

In 1853, George Crum in Schenectady, New York invented the potato chip.

Senator Schumer from New York made reference to the fact in last week's groundbreaking for a new computer chip factory in upstate New York.

The state is invested heavily in public subsidies try to attract chip manufacturers. You can read more about the announcement and the groundbreaking here and here.

As regional economic development groups start to focus more on the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship, we start to see more sharing among regions. It's simple to understand how regions move away from "zero-sum" mindsets in which there must be winners and losers. In a recruitment game, there is only one winner.

But as open innovation networks form, many winners can emerge. Indeed, as more people and resources join a network, the probabilities of success go up exponentially. So, it makes a lot of sense to collaborate. You improve your chances of success dramatically.

We can see some of this thinking under the surface of a new collaboration in green technology sparked by the Green Valley Initiative in California. Read more.

Karen Mills is a venture capitalist who has taken over as the top administrator at the Small Business Administration. She is a big advocate of cluster development, and she was author of key Brookings Institution report last summer. It will be interesting to see how she will reshape the SBA.  Read some background on Mills here.

We can get some hints her plans from this announcement of an event in which the SBA will promote its first cluster initiative: the Michigan Automotive-Robotics Economic Cluster. Read more. 

The SBA's Office of Advocacy produces some very useful reports on the growth of authorship. However, the mainline initiatives of the agency have not changed much in 40 years. He nearly 1960s, the SBA provided an important boost to the venture capital industry with the Small Business Investment Company program. Beyond that, however, the SBA has not been very innovative.

 There is a big opportunity here, and we'll see if Mills seizes it.

One Southern Indiana is a promising economic development organization operating in southern Indiana across the Ohio River from Louisville.  A number of years ago, you would never expect an economic development organization to sponsor an entrepreneurship program for teenagers.  But they are with the YES initiative: 

This month, the three-day Youth Entrepreneur Success (YES) program will introduce area children to the principles of business ownership and skills necessary for success in any career field.

Read more.

Economic development builds the foundations for prosperity in the next generation. Forward thinking EDPros recognize that what the economists call "endogenous growth" -- growth from within -- is far more promising and stable than old models of economic development that relied exclusively on recruitment.

When EDPros think of North Carolina, they  they probably think initially of Research Triangle Park. Over the past couple of years, regional leaders in the Piedmont Triad have been making progress with new collaborations. They recently announced a new partnership in design. They're developing a new partnership  in global logistics. They are encouraging new collaborations in healthcare education.

 Today, a news article announces a new partnership, the Piedmont Triad International Bioscience Business Center.  The Greensboro Chamber of Commerce operates as the hub of this new network. Notice how the president of the chamber takes pains to make sure people understand that the initiative is not "owned" by the chamber. Read more.