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Ed Morrison · What happens when trust builds: Seeing inside a regional innovation cluster
December 14th, 2011
On the Space Coast this week, working on new development strategies for regional innovation clusters. Clusters that accelerate regional innovation are not simply agglomerations of like-situated firms. Instead, regional innovation clusters form around an ethic of open innovation.
With open innovation, the presumptions on information sharing are reversed. In the old world of our grandfather’s economy, regional actors presumed that information was confidential unless they took steps to release it (hence, the “press release”). In a world of open networks, we presume to share information unless we take affirmative steps to protect it (hence the proliferation of passwords).
Shifting this presumption is important. It leads to collaborations that form more quickly, as well as collaborations that can evolve to higher levels of sophistication. At it’s core, the shift involves changing patterns of behavior that are often deeply engrained in a region. In places where the old industrial mindset is still dominant — Detroit, Cleveland and Shreveport, LA come to mind — information is not widely shared. Trust levels among civic leaders are relatively low, and the adaptation process slows.
In contrast, some older industrial cities are moving along a new path. Milwaukee, WI; Rockford, IL; and Holland, MI come to mind. These are places where regional innovation clusters can more quickly form: the water cluster in Milwaukee; the aerospace cluster in Rockford; the electric battery cluster in Holland.
To illustrate the complexity that can quickly arise in a regional innovation cluster, I developed this drawing. The challenge, of course, comes in moving a regional economy in this direction. We have found that old strategy constructs — strategic planning — do not work well in these open networks for a variety of reasons. That’s why we have designed new strategy disciplines expressly for meeting the challenges of designing and managing open, loosely joined networks.
Ed Morrison · Outlook for Buffalo’s future is now $100 million brighter
December 11th, 2011
Outlook for Buffalo’s future is now $100 million brighter
Here is the plan that Western New York submitted:
Ed Morrison · Rethinking manufacturing options for the Great Lakes Nation
December 11th, 2011
Old manufacturing in Allentown. Photo by Flickr user Don Campolongo
Rethinking manufacturing options for the Great Lakes Nation: Can Hip Urban Crafts Help Revitalize Rust Belt Manufacturing?
Ed Morrison · STEM, loosely joined networks, and open innovation
December 11th, 2011
With the publication of the National Academy’s Rising Above the Gathering Storm report, our attention has been increasingly focused on the connection of STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and our national competitiveness.
Knowledge provides the new basis of wealth creation, and the STEM disciplines form that core of an economy’s capacity to generate and apply new knowledge. U.S. leadership in these disciplines has begun to erode. The National Academy’s report called for a “comprehensive and coordinated” federal effort to restore U.S. pre-eminence in these areas.
As mandated under the America Competes Act, last week the Federal government released a report that provides an inventory of all federal STEM initiatives. It is the most comprehensive inventory of federal STEM initiatives.
- The federal government invests about $3.4 billion in STEM initiatives.
- $1.1 billion of the total to focus on the needs of demographic groups that are under-represented in the STEM disciplines.
- $312 million goes directly to improve teacher effectiveness. (Other initiatives have a secondary goal of improving teacher effectiveness.
To learn more about STEM disciplines and why they matter, visit the Change the Equation web site.
A federal effort can only go so far. The real challenge of transforming STEM education lies elsewhere.
Innovation in the STEM disciplines is grounded in regional economies. At the regional level, we have the concentration of assets — K-12 education, higher education, business clusters, philanthropy — needed to innovate and transform how teachers teach and students learn these disciplines.
This innovation will be driven by “open source” disciplines, like Strategic Doing, to create new, innovating networks. These regional networks take time and discipline to form. The regions that focus their efforts on developing these new, innovating networks will be more competitive. They will learn faster, spot opportunities to innovate faster, and act faster. They will build the collaborations capable of tackling the complex challenges of education transformation.
In our rapidly evolving global economy, wealth will concentrate in these new hubs of open innovation. (Tom Friedman has an interesting commentary that touches on the topic.)
At Purdue, we are part of a broad STEM initiative in Indiana. Five years ago, we set out to increase the concentration of Project Lead the Way high high schools in our region. We now have the highest concentration of these high schools in the country. Our commitment was part of the decision to move the PLTW headquarters from New York to Indianapolis. A week-long series of events starts this coming week.
PLTW is part of a broader network of innovation taking place in the STEM disciplines in Indiana. The I-STEM Network in Indiana represented an unprecedented collaboration to accelerate Indiana to national leadership in STEM innovation. The network is anchored by regional lead institutions.
In the past year, I have been working on the Space Coast and Central Florida. We have been deploying “open source” models to accelerate regional collaboration and cluster activation. Florida has been also moving on statewide STEM initiatives. Here are two reports that are guiding their efforts. The challenge in Florida — as in other states — will be driving the statewide initiatives to a regional level. Modeling the Indiana network approach is a good place to start.
Ed Morrison · Memories of Oklahoma City circa 1993
December 8th, 2011
Years ago, when we started working on the transformation of Oklahoma City, I would come into town and stay at the one downtown hotel, The Medallion. There was one one Mexican restaurant that was open at night a couple of blocks away. When I would walk to it, I’d pass no one on the street.
Walking to Bricktown, to the one restaurant there, The Spaghetti Warehouse, was a bit dicier. You had to be willing to walk a bit farther and pass through an unlit tunnel under the railroad tracks.
Worse still, I suppose, when I would come down for breakfast in the morning, I would often be the only person there. Think of that for a minute: the only person in the only downtown hotel in the capital of Oklahoma.
We started the transformation of Oklahoma City with about 8 people, a few years before the bombing. When that tragedy struck, we shelved our plans for a number of months. But soon, we returned to the task of transformation.
Evidence of our work began appearing a few years later. By 2000, I had left Oklahoma City behind, but the job of transformation continues. I just came across this video through my Twitter feed. The story of Oklahoma City is inspiring a new generation of leaders.
Charles Van Rysselberge, the chamber president who spurred Oklahoma City’s business community and I are now in the process of writing the story of the transformation. It’s a story with plenty of lessons for leaders in cities and regions facing the challenge of a rapidly shifting global economy.
Ed Morrison · New York regional funding awards
December 8th, 2011
New York has been running a regional competition for state funds. Today, the governor made the announcement of where the funds end up. This article provides some background.
Here’s a booklet that explores the funding at a project level.
Ed Morrison · Insights on the impact of the recession on the unemployed
December 8th, 2011
- Impact of the recession on lifestyle
- Their current financial condition
- Their sense of whether the impact on their lifestyle is permanent or temporary
Ed Morrison · Report on rural broadband in Wisconsin
December 8th, 2011
The Wisconsin Technology Council has issued a report urging accelerated broadband development in rural WIsconsin.
The report lays out a compelling case for why broadband access is critical to the future development of rural counties: improved access to health care; more higher education options; stronger support for “traded” businesses that penetrate national and international markets; improved public safety; and a stronger infrastructure to support tourism development.
The report lays out a compelling case for why broadband access is critical to the future development of rural counties: improved access to health care; more higher education options; stronger support for “traded” businesses that penetrate national and international markets; improved public safety; and a stronger infrastructure to support tourism development.
Ed Morrison · New York: Strategic coherence at a regional scale
December 4th, 2011
The major advantage of New York’s focus on building regional strategies comes in fostering coherence at a regional scale. You can see this emerge in the presentations made last week.
This discipline of preparing a regional plan has a few significant advantages:
- The leaders go beyond vision statements. In a world of complex networks, coherence is more important than vision. By their nature vision statements are grand, idealistic, and somewhat fanciful. In putting them together, the tendency — to build consensus — is to get more vague with our language, not more precise. Ironically, in seeking consensus, we get washed out rhetoric that fails to move people.
- Leaders focus on building coherence through clear narratives. Coherent narratives — story-telling — provides meaning and guidance. In developing these narratives, regional leaders move toward their assets and draw links among them. The noted child psychologist Erik Erickson wrote in his classic Childhood and Society, that “We are who we are never not”. The same is true for regions. Discovering who we are never not provides the basis for strategy, and good strategy, after all, is good story-telling.
- Leaders understand the importance of linking and leveraging. No one project will transform a region. It’s only when projects link and leverage the assets within the regional economy that transformation becomes possible. Linking and leveraging is all about the discipline of co-creating value. Understanding how to design and manage networks that co-create value has become the essence of regional strategy.
New York would do well to figure out a way to keep this regional process moving forward with continuous state support. State (and federal) policymakers often fall into the trap of thinking that progress will be made when regional leaders “get their act together”. True enough, but the thought neglects the equally important job of redesigning state and federal policies to support regional innovation.
Most of our economic and workforce development policies are 30, 40 or 50 years old. They are categorical programs designed to define (sometimes) carefully targeted problems. With few exceptions (SBIR comes to mind), they are not policies designed to stimulate us to pursue opportunities.
Simply bundling old programs together (as the Obama administration did with is Jobs and Accelerator grants) is not the answer. These policies need to be redesigned to encourage and invest in the collaborations we need to innovate. That means tackling the underlying statutes. At the same time, we need to be training state and federal professionals in new, network based models of regional development. Developing strategy in networks involves abandoning “top-down” or “bottom-up” thinking. (Networks have neither.)
Rather, professionals within our regional development systems need to learn the skills of collaboration. How do you design complex collaborations quickly and manage them to generate learning by doing? The answer has more to do with understanding open source software development than with writing or following tight government regulations.
In all the blather about what government can do to create jobs, this is an agenda that has been too long neglected.
Ed Morrison · Tennessee’s investment guidelines for its co-investment fund
December 4th, 2011
Tennessee has come up with a useful model for stimulating investment in high growth, emerging companies. The state is now seeking public comment.
The INCITE co-investment fund fences off investments in local businesses (retail, services, real estate) and traded businesses that are controversial (gambling, oil and gas extraction). The fund focuses on firms under 500 employees (the federal definition of small business). Finally, the fund sets up guidelines for co-investment in tiers or stages, much like the Small Business Innovation Research — SBIR — program.
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