Brewed Fresh Daily

On a day when hundreds of Ohio leaders gathered to discuss the serious competitive challenges facing our state, the U.S. economy shows continued serious weakness, the financial markets still try to settle after the U.S. government engineers the world’s largest bailout, investment bank Lehman Brothers stands on the brink of another bailout, the recognition starts hitting home that our poor educational performance is creating severe competitive consequences, and the bleeding of petrodollars accelerates, the Republican Party and the McCain campaign skirt the edge of legality and absurdity by talking about putting lipstick on pigs.

Shameful.

After reading this excerpt, make sure you click thru to read all of Lev’s commentary as well as check out the ‘World Map of Shrinking Cities’ video he’s posted:

Population size remains relevant in the connected community but does fall victim to the demographers imperative that size equals destiny. The art of designing a connected-city, especially as part of a re-invention project, may well be one of the biggest opportunities of the 21st century. Connected-cities enables learning, participation, and opportunities to re-discover the value of human ingenuity. Connected cities and their citizens and neighborhoods can export virtues like art, education, culture, and sport over the 21st century transportation system known as the Internet. Creativity, diversity, smart and green are important inputs into the connected city allowing us to better balance economic opportunities with creating livable neighborhoods, accentuating quality of life, and a more sustainable approach to the broader eco-systems within which our cities evolve…

Bytes From Lev: Reports of Cities’ Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

A few months back Tom Breckenridge at the PD wrote a story about efforts to make Northeast Ohio more attractive to immigrants. The people down in Wooster were paying attention and last week the Wooster Growth Corp. voted to spend $50,000 to apply for the EB-5 program with the Cleveland Council on World Affairs. Wooster Growth hopes to attract foreign investors for a planned $7.5 million building in its bioag business park being developed near the Ohio Agricultural Research & Development Center (one of the region’s world-class assets). I’ve written a little more about it here and you can read the Wooster Daily Record story here. Kudos to Breckenridge for highlighting the need, and kudos to Wooster for being willing to pick up the ball and run with it. It will likely be more than a year before any of this produces a building and jobs, but it’s great to see organizations willing to take the risk necessary to get it started.

The Pittsburgh Convention Center has “chronic” operating deficits of about $3.8 million per year.

Revenues: $6.2 million

Expenses: $10 million

Deficit: $3.8 million

Convention Center seeks RAD funds to offset operating losses

Is this really a smart investment for a County facing structural deficits?

(This analysis by Carnegie Mellon raised significant questions about the costs and benefits of a convention center in Pittsburgh. Public officials ignored the warnings, and now they are wearing cement shoes.)

According to this overview of the market from New Orleans, the market for convention space is not generating revenues because of steep discounting.

The move toward discounting follows a national trend. An industrywide oversupply of meeting space, brought on by a wave of convention center expansions, has forced many facilities to offer financial incentives to potential customers.

The risks of this type of investment are considerable. Cleveland could end up with a white elephant, and that future is not pretty as this commentary from Los Angeles makes clear.

What can be done to rejuvenate the state’s economy?

Out here in California, we’re seeing the leading edge of a panic, as businesses cannot find skilled employees. (I’m here at a conference to introduce Open Source Economic Development to the California Workforce Association.)

Some sound bites: San Diego is recruiting machinists from Ireland. Lockheed took a year to recruit 40 machinists in Los Angeles. The state forecasts a need for 11,000 machinists in the next six years. Sacramento employers are losing faith in high schools to provide skilled workers and are increasingly turning to their own training solutions, working with community colleges. Silicon Valley is moving on a new workforce strategy, and USC’s engineering school has launched a very successful business retention initiative focused on applying insights from complex adaptive systems. New networks are forming, like the California Edge Campaign, to deal with the looming crisis.

From what I’ve heard in California, the Greater Cleveland Partnership’s focus on a convention center — in a city with a 60%+ high school drop out rate — is even more astonishing, like a bad Cleveland joke. As one speaker put it today, high school drop-outs earn $290,000 less over their lifetime than a high school graduate and are eight times more likely to end up incarcerated.

As a country, we are running out of the brainpower needed to sustain globally competitive businesses. California’s got some major problems, but at least people are starting to acknowledge the depth of the talent shortages ahead.

At IndianaWIRED, we have been experimenting with a number of different ideas, all designed to cross the traditional boundaries that have held back our capacity to innovate. Here’s an example.

This summer we held our second week-long Entrepreneurship Academy at the Purdue Research Park. During the camp, high school students form teams and work on real case studies of start-ups. During the week, they are charged with developing an executive summary for a business plan and an “elevator pitch”.

The top three teams win vouchers that can be used for higher education expenses. Read more.

This simple idea is helping us change the perceptions about entrepreneurship in our 14 county region. It’s also strengthening the networks between our region’s high schools and our region’s leading research university. Finally, this modest experiment is shifting the conversation about the future of economic development.

People are rediscovering a fundamental fact: Wealth is created by innovative companies and the entrepreneurs who guide their development.

Here’s a very good PD interview with the new partner at Early Stage Partners: Q & A: Mike Bunker, Early Stage Partners (My hat is off to the PD: Good integration of audio in this article.)

Focusing on early stage investments is a tough, but very important business. Read “Does Silicon Valley Face an Innovation Crisis?” in today’s NYT.

Following this thread of financing emerging businesses: there’s also a good article from yesterday’s Western Michigan Business Review: Financing tomorrow’s economy now

Hopkins and Wright State University welcomed more than 200 leaders in business, education, health care, government and industry Wednesday to its second-annual Regional Summit, discussing some of the leading concerns affecting business in the area….

“Higher education is the business of economic development,” Ohio Board of Regents’ Chancellor Eric Fingerhut said in the morning’s welcome session….

In the Product Innovation and Commercialization group, Ireland native Eugene Peden gave a fiery speech comparing Dayton to his homeland.

“I look at this region, and I see a great parallel to Ireland,” said Peden, vice president of operations at PECO II, a telecommunications power equipment and service provider.

Peden said like the Dayton region, Ireland was heavily dependent on the manufacturing industry, but has emerged as one of the fasted growing economies in the world because of a strong educational system.

The strong educational system allowed the country to change gears and flourish in emerging industries, which is exactly the point the summit was hoping to make with regional leaders.

“Be afraid, be very afraid, but let’s have that fear energize us,” Peden said.

Dayton-area leaders gather for annual summit at local university

What’s happened to regional leadership in NEO?

Spent the day with the Council on Competitiveness and learned about major regional initiatives underway in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, West Michigan.

The best examples with application to NEO: Greater Philadelphia Regional Compact for STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math ) Education and West Michigan Strategic Alliance.

Some important, clear lessons are emerging about what works in regional leadership.

Two interesting stories of emerging collaborations in NEO:

KSU part of grant worth $8 million Will be for liquid crystal research:

The cluster combines research capabilities at KSU, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and Youngstown State University with the environmental technologies at the Cleveland Botanical Garden. KSU and the botanical garden have co-developed glass that, with the touch of a button, can become transparent or opaque to allow sunlight into a greenhouse or block out the sun to protect plants from heat and sun damage.

and

Regionalism plan moves forward into second phase:

The Northeast Ohio Mayors and City Managers Association agreed to continue to explore the initial results of the Regional Economic Revenue Study and pursue four strategic directions in phase II of the study.

Currin said the goal of the RERS is to increase job growth and economic development in the region.