Brewed Fresh Daily

Another day, another Forbes list goes and kicks Cleveland square in the chin. This time we’re the “most miserable city” (unless you’re a single, of course, in which case, don’t worry because you’re living in one of the best cities in America, according to Forbes). Unlike the winter weather list I criticized last week, the problem with Cleveland’s newest “worst” designation has less to do with the micro issue of badly flawed methodologies and more to do with the macro approach that magazines like Forbes take when evaluating and comparing cities.

When Forbes editors sit around a conference table in their Manhattan headquarters (I’m assuming this is how it happens, who knows what actually goes down), they start with a conclusion and work backwards. For instance, they want to determine the worst weather cities, so they ask, “what makes weather bad?” Somebody shouts “snow” another “cold”. Similarly, they might ask, “what makes for a good singles city?” They brainstorm variables like: cheap rent, cheap beer and the number of profiles on Match.com. What they’re failing to ask is: what makes for good weather or what makes for a bad singles city and then factoring those variables into the analysis.

Think of it like this… when people have a tough decision to make in life, many will put together a pros and cons list. The idea behind this exercise is that it forces you to explore the entirety of an issue instead of focusing only on one side and making a bad decision – to ensure that no important variables are omitted.

What Forbes effectively does is create lists that are exclusively pro or exclusively con. Thinking about cities in these terms doesn’t make any sense.

Cleveland ranks as America’s most miserable city because the data conforms to the variables that Forbes thinks makes a city a miserable place. In fact, when you read Forbes’s “happiest cities in the world” list (don’t bother though, none of Forbes’s lists are worth your time), you notice that they analyze an entirely different set of variables. When we compare cities, we need to compare both the good and the bad; otherwise we draw conclusions that merely confirm pre-determined beliefs.

This Cleveland Foundation move is a test for the community. Will it deal with the fallout and move on positively, or fall back into bickering and recrimination? The answer will be a sign of how far Cleveland has come on the regionalism journey.

And it is a journey. Regions don’t get there overnight. Whatever happens here, Cleveland has gone from being a metro that was nowhere on regionalism a decade ago to having many active regional programs underway today. Regardless of how far northeast Ohio may still have to go, it has come a long way already, and that’s a real accomplishment.

Cleveland and the Regionalism Challenge

The first annual Dayton Water Conference is scheduled for May 10-12 at the University of Dayton. The Water Innovations Alliance, a Connecticut-based association promoting water technologies, is coordinating the event.

Dayton Water Conference

Is anyone looking at NEO’s fresh water technology assets? Here’s what happened when Purdue worked with University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. We formed a new water cluster: The Milwaukee 7 Water Council.

Strategic Doing and the Milwaukee 7 Water Cluster from Ed Morrison on Vimeo.

FBI meets with Cleveland casino officials to warn them about potential crime

The Current Situation

The recent decision by the Cleveland Foundation to reduce its commitment to the Fund for our Economic Future (the “Future Fund”) opens the door to a new, promising future for Northeast Ohio. In the past, the Future Fund concentrated its investments on a handful of important regional initiatives.

Now, it appears, these regional organizations will continue to move forward, but with different funding formulas. The Cleveland Foundation has invited these organizations to apply directly for support. This step frees the Future Fund to concentrate on the development of a more network-based approach to regional economic development.

The development of a truly regional strategy in Northeast Ohio has been slowed to some extent by the perception that most regional initiatives are anchored in Cleveland. In other words, the regional entities based in Cleveland (including the Future Fund) faced difficulty to overcome the perception of being too “Cleveland centric”.

Concentrating too much on Cleveland ignores the major competitive strength of the region. Unlike most regional economies, which rely on a single anchor metropolitan economy, Northeast Ohio operates with multiple metros. This diversity creates strength, if the assets of each of these metros can be strategically linked.

The Opportunity

The Future Fund has the opportunity to pursue a more networked approach throughout the region that generates “link and leverage” strategies which tie together the strengths of these metros. We are already seeing these types of alliances emerge. The Innovation Alliance between The University of Akron and Lorain County Community College represents one example. Lorain County Community College is also partnering with Youngstown State University to develop new community college options in the Mahoning Valley. These are only two of the many alliances are beginning to form.

An effective regional economic development strategy can build on these networks. The Future Fund can provide the catalyst for accelerating the development of these networks. In order to serve this role, the Future Fund must take two steps. First, the Fund needs to reframe the opportunities of regional development in Northeast Ohio around the concepts of open innovation and networks. Second, the Future Fund needs to form an effective alliance with all of the postsecondary institutions within the region. These institutions have the talent and the innovation assets that the region needs to rebuild its economic foundations.

To varying degrees, colleges and universities strengthen regional economies in three important ways. They generate knowledge (research); they disseminate knowledge (teaching); and they leverage knowledge (engagement). Most people are comfortable understanding the role of colleges and universities in research and teaching. Yet, some of the most dramatic advances in redefining the role of colleges and universities are taking place with redefining engagement.

So, for example, Penn State University has convened more than 20 research universities with its Roundtable for Transformative Regional Engagement. In coming months, the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities will be issuing an important report on the role universities play in anchoring development in cities. The Association of University Technology Managers has another important initiative underway to redefine the metrics for measuring the impacts of university investments and initiatives on regional economic performance. The Association of Public and Land Grant Universities is also actively involved in redefining the role of public universities in regional economic development.

Northeast Ohio is fortunate to have The University of Akron. President Proenza is playing a leading role nationally in defining the new pathways for university engagement in regional economies. MIT’s recent work on the role of universities in regional economic development looked closely at Northeast Ohio with two important reports by Sean Safford, now at the University of Chicago’s business school: Searching for Silicon Valley in the RustBelt: The Evolution of Knowledge Networks in Akron and Rochester and Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown: Civic infrastructure and mobilization in economic crises.

The University of Akron gives the Future Fund a valuable vantage point on these important developments and can move Northeast Ohio to the top tier of regions around the country that effectively leverage university assets for regional economic development.

(Disclosure: The Purdue Center for Regional Development, where I am on the staff, is working closely with The University of Akron on redefining the university role in regional economic development. Purdue and The University of Akron are also partnering with Penn State to deploy these network based models of regional economic development. The video below shows how we have used these strategies, working with the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, to build that region’s water cluster. The second video shows how we used these strategies by combining Purdue, Indiana University-Kokomo, and the Kauffman Foundation to respond to the downsizing of the auto industry in Kokomo. The main advantage of these network strategies: speed and focus.)

Strategic Doing and the Milwaukee 7 Water Cluster from Ed Morrison on Vimeo.

Kokomo Innovates: Using networks to re-engage from Ed Morrison on Vimeo.

After it is determined a customer is owed money and the appropriate request for a refund is made, the division’s finance department reviews the case, then sends it to either Nielson or Withers’ office for approval. After that, the request goes to City Hall for a final OK.

Water officials said City Hall does not process requests from the middle of December to the middle of January, another reason why some checks are delayed.

Customers of Cleveland Division of Water complain about waiting months for refunds

As I read it, there are four levels of review.

Science writing is not easy, and we are fortunate to have John Mangels so close.

A tantalizing hint, but not proof, of elusive dark matter, reports Cleveland physicist and research team

Other article that are a joy to read:

The colors of a feathered dinosaur emerge as University of Akron researcher and colleagues analyze fossil

New research reveals more about the lives of Northeast Ohio’s elusive urban coyotes

Using a 69-year-old telescope, Case Western Reserve University astronomers probe the secrets of massive galaxy clusters

Cleveland’s NASA Glenn Research Center aids in the comeback of supersonic flight

Paleontologist Scott Sampson to speak today at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History about exotic dinosaurs of ‘West America’

Google shuts down music blogs without warning

Now that everyone in Cleveland has posted to their Twitter and Facebook pages Forbes’s new article on America’s “worst winter weather cities” (I’m not linking to the article because I don’t think Forbes deserves the traffic), it’s about time to take a step back and look at exactly why Cleveland managed to come out on the top of this list.

It’s unfortunate that Tim Kiladze and Forbes have given some folks ammunition to perpetuate the self-depreciating victim attitude that seems to be too prevalent around here. Forbes is notorious for these “best of” and “worst of” lists, which typically rely on badly flawed methodologies. At the end of the day, Forbes’s motivation is to sell magazines and drive traffic to its website, not to provide any valuable insight about these cities. It’s a potential gold mine for the magazine because, no matter how the lists shake out, local media absolutely eats this stuff up. Until that stops (and there is no indication that it will), Forbes will keep turning the crank.

The most obvious question to ask about this “worst city” list is “worst compared to whom”? Kiladze tells us:

In compiling our list, we measured weather patterns in the country’s fifty largest cities, or Incorporated Places and Minor Civil Divisions as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau.

50 largest cities… sounds reasonable, right? Not really, because the size of cities is determined by arbitrary boundaries. Using this metric, cities like ElPaso , TX, Tucson, AZ and Fresno, CA are all technically “larger” than Cleveland. Meanwhile, none of the cities in upstate New York, where it would be logical to think about the cities as inflicted with “harsh winter weather”, make the cut. Buffalo is the 69th largest city, Rochester the 99th and Syracuse the 174th. With those cities out of the running, Cleveland doesn’t have a whole lot of tough competition.

But there’s more. Other potential “bad weather” cities that you might expect to fall in the top 50 don’t make the cut either. A few include: Cincinnati (56th), Pittsburgh (60th), St. Paul (66th), Anchorage (67th) and Madison (81st). Eliminating all of these cities from the methodology is akin to kicking the Cavs and the Lakers out of the NBA and then declaring the team that wins the playoffs the “world’s best”.

Still, this doesn’t change the fact that Kiladze’s methodology finds Cleveland to have worse winter weather than Minneapolis. How did that happen? The author explains:

…data was provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and tracks average annual temperature, total precipitation in inches and total snowfall in inches. The temperature and precipitation data was calculated over a 30-year period from 1971 to 2000–NOAA’s most recent figures because of its decadal calculation schedule–and the snowfall levels included up to 2008.

Here is where things really start to fall apart. Kiladze is using the year-round average temperature and the year-round average participation to draw normative conclusions about winter weather. This essentially means that any city with blisteringly hot summers is off-the-hook, regardless of what their winters are like, because the summer temperatures will skew the average. But it also means that cities with big variations in temperature benefit as well.

Consider that the average high January temperature in Minneapolis is a frigid 22 degrees Fahrenheit. In contrast, Cleveland averages 33 degrees in January – a significant 11 degree gap. But the average July temperature in Minneapolis is 83 degrees, versus only 81 degrees in Cleveland. When you average the numbers together, Minneapolis doesn’t look quite nearly as bad as it should.

Further, Kiladze makes no attempt to analyze how different cities respond to winter weather. It’s merely assumed that an inch of snow is an inch of snow, no matter where it falls. This is laughable. One of my worst travel experiences was on a trip I took to Atlanta in January of 2005. Upon arriving, a few inches of snow covered the ground, barely enough to make anyone in Cleveland think twice about canceling their dinner plans, but enough to ruin our entire weekend in Atlanta. There really was nothing to do in the city other than sit around the hotel and watch movies on cable. Point is.. a city unprepared for winter can be easily crippled. In a city that can handle it, life doesn’t have to come to a halt.

The bottom line is that the headlines makes a powerful statement that the fine print can’t back up. That doesn’t mean Cleveland’s winters are tropical or that I’m not anxious for it all to be over. It does show that Forbes’s lists are intellectually bankrupt and don’t deserve anyone’s time of day.

Yesterday, in Evansville, I worked with a core group of ten regional leaders from a three state region of twenty-seven counties touching Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky.

We explored how to manage a complex strategy in this large a region. In April, we will launch this approach with a regional gathering of about 100 people from across the region.

Thomas Malone from MIT calls this organizational structure a “loose hierarchy”. I prefer the term “managed network”. This approach is light weight and nimble. As we move forward, we are budgeting for 1.5 full time staff people.

Total admin budget will be about $100,000 per year. This approach replicates the model we have been using at Purdue with our 14 county region for the past three years.