As for Florida, he seems to fancy himself. The sad part is that his ideas are often borrowed without attribution. So, for example, his work on creative cities borrowed heavily from work underway in Europe. (A far better book on the role of creativity and cities: Charles Landry’s The Creative City.)

(Another lapse: Florida’s more recent focus on mega-regions makes little mention of the early work on this concept at Virginia Tech or the America 2050 project.)

I’ve always found Florida’s formulations impractical. Extending his Creative Class ideas with his “indexes” does not help much, it turns out.

Our colleagues at Indiana University recently worked with us on a set of tools for regional innovation. They found very little correlation between Florida’s creativity indexes and regional innovation performance.

Florida, it seems, has turned from being an academic to a popularizer.

(Learn more about our work on regional innovation here.)

If the connection is hazy, look for those bloated fees to plummet. And soon, I suspect.

Likewise, if you can’t produce some fairly pragmatic ROI connection, then a two dollar consulting fee is bloated.

Economic development advice either pays for itself by orders of magnitude making the size of the fee practically meaningless, or the fee is wasted.

Without a clear, solid connection to results, every fee of whatever size is bloated.