Promising Practices in Regional Economic Development: Northeast Ohio

Last week, I attended an event focused on the importance of regional planning, partnerships between government, workforce, education, and economic development, and how encouraging entrepreneurship in regions can help spur economic growth and prevent further population loss.

My own organization, Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW), has initiated or has involvement in several regional strategies in Michigan, Arizona, and across the country. Though CSW is not working in Northeast Ohio, this region won notoriety in its efforts to transform the region into a global economic competitor. We can learn from this example.

Regional Strategic Planning

In 2003, philanthropic and corporate leaders committed themselves to building a strategy from the ground up. I was living in Cleveland at the time and took part in the focus groups called Voices and Choices that informed the region’s efforts.

Moving to Action

Advance Northeast Ohio, the region’s economic action plan was launched in 2007 and creates a common vision for more than 80 partner organizations, institutions and leaders from business, philanthropy, and government. The 16-county partnership is committed to collaborating and implementing strategies that help create jobs, increase incomes, and reduce poverty, collectively strengthening the region.

Clear Priorities

The partnership has identified four clear priorities to guide its work:

• Business Growth and Attraction
• Talent Development
• Racial and Economic Inclusion
• Government Collaboration and Efficiency

Regional Investors

A regional funders collaborative, The Fund for Our Economic Future, emerged to support the region’s effort, and demonstrates how corporate and philanthropic partners can invest in a common vision.  Of the over $60million raised, most of the resources have been granted to regional economic development organizations that work to start, accelerate, attract, and grow companies in the region.

Tracking Progress

To monitor progress, partners, assisted by George Erickcek of the Upjohn Institute, created a community economic dashboard which is now updated annually by Cleveland State University. The dashboard is an index, tracking indicators in the following nine areas:

• Skilled Workforce and Research & Development (R&D)
• Legacy of Place
• Urban Assimilation
• Racial Inclusion and Income Equality
• Locational Amenities
• Technology Commercialization
• Urban/Metro Structure
• Individual Entrepreneurship
• Business Dynamics

Award Winning Practices

Jumpstart is northeast Ohio’s venture development organization that invests in early stage businesses and ideas. Through the end of 2008, it invested in 34 companies, which have raised more than $100 million in growth capital. The program was recently recognized for Excellence in Urban or Suburban Economic Development by the U.S. Economic Development Administration.*(See footnote)

Community engagement, regional action guided by strategy and clear priorities, consistent investment, and innovative practices—these are key ingredients in a recipe for regional transformation.

* Other finalists in the same category: Composites Kansas (WIRED Initiative, Wichita, Kansas); Conway Development Corporation (Conway, Arkansas); Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (Los Angeles, California).

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What’s Community Agility?

Two years ago – when we launched the Community Initiatives Team – agility was on ours minds. Pre-recession, we were hearing flat, but seeing spiky. Our team members live and work in regions as diverse as Portland (OR), Tucson (AZ), Charlotte (NC), and all over Michigan. So while the U.S. economy at the time was widely perceived as booming, our communities were still smarting from the steep downturn a few year before. Yet, we were also bearing witnesses to infinitely creative responses to new challenges, and the beginnings of new kind of economy.

In our work, we were confronting significant structural challenges:

• Decreasing overall economic security for families despite job growth
• Industry-wide transitions changing job and skill requirements for large numbers of workers
• Lack of access to investment capital where entrepreneurs seemed to need it most
• Chronic budget shortfalls compromising basic public services in our communities, and
• Institutions, agencies, and organizations with clearly shared missions acting in isolation.

At the same time, we saw opportunities for collaboration (on and offline) and reinvention everywhere. We focused on building agility.

Developing Methods for Change

With the aim of helping communities find opportunities to thrive while also managing through downturns, and with partners including the U.S. Department of Labor, the Council on Competitiveness, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, we developed methods and approaches for cultivating agility:

• Developing shared intelligence, by collecting and making meaning out of data that matters to multiple community organizations and agencies.
• Promoting network weaving, based on the theory that a whole host of benefits derived from well-networked communities (we had been studying networks for some time, but found Sean Safford’s early work at MIT – subsequently published in book form – very compelling). Later we partnered with June Holley to learn techniques for social network analysis.
• Facilitating collaboration across “silos”, so that people from across disciplines, departments, agencies, programs, organizations, and institutions find common ground and begin to share ideas, talent, and resources in ways that maximize wider community benefits.
• Encouraging public engagement, since real change happens in firms, schools, and neighborhoods, not just boardrooms.
• Advancing an entrepreneurship agenda that emphasizes not just new ventures, but entrepreneurial culture itself.

These methods emphasize the building of capacity—to collaborate and to innovate—so that communities can reinvent themselves over and over, not just build the next new thing. We worked with (and learned from) community leaders and project partners from five U.S. Department of Labor WIRED regions (Southeast MI, Mid MI, Southern AZ, Kansas City, and the Piedmont Triad NC partnership) and two BRAC regions (Ft. Bragg NC and Southwest OK), and a host of other communities in transition.

Checking In

Last week, our team met in person to review progress, and take a look at the current (and growing) ecosystem around community agility (now increasingly called resilience.)

New Trends

While we’d been paying attention to the emergence of new conversations and community innovation spaces individually, sharing this information helped all of us see that we are now in the company of more (and more diverse) people advancing some of the same goals. Here are a few we’re pretty excited about.

Social Innovation

The people who identify with “social innovation” are a wildly diverse, eclectic and exciting bunch, ranging from the academically-inclined Stanford Social Innovation Review crowd to the entrepreneurial community that is Social Edge (Skoll Foundation) to the activists, organizers, and media mavens who see new ways to make change through the social web. The new White House Office of Social Innovation will certainly accelerate interest in the field, which is now beginning to map itself. And interest in social innovation is appropriately global. The Young Foundation, SIX, and the Skoll World Forum, together with institutions like Ashoka and the Aspen Institute have nurtured social innovation networks around the globe for years. More recently, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has sponsored a host of initiatives designed to help innovators of all ages and stations leverage the power of social media and the web.

Video and Twitter have helped make much of this activity accessible and transparent. Last week, 900 people gathered at SoCap09 in San Francisco to figure out how to fund it.

Gov2.0

Government (at all levels) is also beginning to reimagine itself. The Obama campaign demonstrated the power of technology to enable self-organization in a campaign context, now we’re working through the implications of this kind of mass connectivity on governing itself. Catalyzed by Tim O’Reilly’s advocacy of “Government as Platform,” gov2.0 has become a rallying cry for transparency, participation, and just better, smarter, government  – among people inside government and out. This week’s Gov2.0 Summit brings together public servants and technologists and advocates and organizers, many of whom are already working together to build the next generation of public intelligence systems and platforms for participation.

The Resilience Movement

The resilient communities movement stems from two different though related sets of ideas: one relating to security, and the other to sustainability more broadly.

• The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is exploring Community Preparedness and Resilience in a variety of ways – the Community and Regional Resilience Initiative (CARRI), for example, reflects a partnership between DHS, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab, and a handful of communities in the Southestern U.S.
• The Institute of Urban and Regional Development at the University of California Berkeley (supported by the MacArthur Foundation) has established a Building Regional Resilience Network , which has published a variety of papers on different dimensions of resilience (environmental, social, economic).
• The Council on Competitiveness made the materials used in its Risk and Resilience workshop available to the public.

People are helping communities become more resilient outside the U.S. as well – parallel efforts exists in Australia, and a more locally-driven approach launched in England.

Smart Communities

Firms like Cisco are promoting smart cities from a data-connectivity point of view, and IBM is advancing its “internet of things” agenda. But people and processes matter just as much. The stakes are high, the promise, great, and the need, urgent. Brookings is tracking the impact of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) on cities and regions seeking to advance innovation or leverage structural change. Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Stanley Litow offer a manifesto for smarter, more connected communities.  John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison’s Big Shift focuses on change dynamics in firms, but their analysis offers insight relevant to communities, too.

Going Forward?

We’re taking a good look at this context in an effort to learn from others, and focus our efforts in ways that maximize impact.

We believe in the power of not just tinkering, but “…unbundling and reconstituting…”
– Don Tapscott

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