Brewed Fresh Daily

The Ohio Department of Development’s Division of Entrepreneurship and Small Business and Small Business Development Centers are now accepting nominations for the 2008 Keys to Success Awards, which recognize the accomplishments and economic contributions of successful Ohio women business owners.

Keys to Success Award winners will be selected based on nomination forms received. Awards will be selected in seven categories: Manufacturing/Technology; Service; Wholesale/Retail; Real Estate/Construction; Healthcare/Medical; Marketing/Advertising/Public Relations; and Rising Star (in business less than five years). Potential recipients must be female majority owners of companies with annual revenues in excess of $500,000, except for Rising Star ($200,000).

Ohio Lieutenant Governor Fisher Calls for Nominations for The Keys to Success Awards

Ohio communities that want to try innovative ways to enhance the viability of local agriculture and the health of area farms can apply for funding from the Center for Farmland Policy Innovation at Ohio State University.

The center, which works with local communities on their farmland protection priorities, has issued a request for proposals focusing on community-based agricultural economic development.

Proposals are due Oct. 31, 2008. The center expects to allot mini-grants in the range of $1,000 to $10,000 per project.

OSU Farmland Policy Innovation Center Announces Mini-grant Program for Ohio Communities

Venture Financing With a Mission Beyond Profit

Here’s an idea: Since it may not be possible to build a convention center for $400 million, why not invest the County’s money into JumpStart and BioEntreprise?

I-Team: Medical Mart Money Problems

(BTW, competition for medical and health care conventions in the medical area just got a little tougher: Philadelphia convention officials announced earlier this week a new strategy to brand Philadelphia as “America’s life sciences meetings destination.” Read more.)

From a Jim Cossler e-mail:

Another national shout out for the exciting and unique managed technology cluster being built by the Youngstown Business Incubator.

This from the national public policy organization PolicyLink in its soon to be released report, To Be Strong Again: Renewing the Promise in Smaller Industrial Cities :

“The Youngstown Business Incubator, which has turned the city into a hot spot for business-to-business software development, is creating jobs and reversing the ‘brain drain’. Against all odds, YBI has made Youngstown the place to be for B2B software developers.”

When so many said we couldn’t, we did. Come see for yourself.

You can review the report in its entirety here.

I’m in New Orleans at Workforce Innovations and looking at CNN this morning.
They’re doing a story on electric vehicles. The host, Miles O’Brien, started his reporting by driving up in a Sparrow, manufactured by Myers Motors in Summit County.
Several years ago, at REI we highlighted the opportunity of the Sparrow. We had a few of them outside Weatherhead and many of folks at Tuesday@REI drove the Sparrow around the block. Herb Crowther and Phil Lane, as I remember, arranged the event.

Today several partners, including the Fund for Our Economic Future (my employer), issued research done by the Center for Governmental Research in Rochester, NY, that details what governments in Northeast Ohio spend on various services.

The research examines local government revenues and expenditures for hundreds of governmental entities in Northeast Ohio’s 16 counties. You can access the reports, raw data and summary charts at the CGR web site, live.cgr.org/NEO/.

The research is not prescriptive — it doesn’t tell governments what to do. But it will be used in a wide variety of efforts under way that are examining what changes are needed to make government more efficient and effective. Such efforts include a new 9-member commission that will recommend changes in Cuyahoga County government by early November to the state, and the 21st Century Government Initiative that is taking off in Stark County. The Canton Repository’s take on the research can be found here. And hopefully it’ll be used by the broader public to help them evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of their local governments.

This research is an important step, but by no means the final step, in a very important conversation that the region must have about the structure and effectiveness of our governments. I look forward to seeing the change it helps prompt.

A few weeks ago, Delaware announced what appears likely to be the first offshore wind project in the U.S. Now, the governor is using that announcement to guide the state’s economic development strategy in renewables.

You can learn more about Bluewater Wind here.

Here’s a note from Leslie Scott at the North Carolina Rural Center:

We have seen in NC the emergence of public libraries — business librarians in particular — as key players in networks of people who help entrepreneurs, especially in at least two of our rural regions. Many start-ups and aspiring entrepreneurs use the library as a first point of information and it’s great when the business librarian knows the other resource people in the region.

In the Rocky Mount region east of Raleigh there is a group of public libraries across 3 counties working together through a grant-funded project called Business Information Center Outreach Services Program (BICOS) on improving their entrepreneurship-related resources. They are subscribing to more business “intelligence” sources, and they have recently started offering on-site counseling through SCORE. See http://www.bicos-nc.org for more info.

Ms. Leslie A. Scott
Director, Institute for Rural Entrepreneurship
N.C. Rural Center
4021 Carya Drive
Raleigh, NC 27610
919/250-4314
fax: 919/250-4325
www.ncruralcenter.org/entrepreneurship

Years ago, a group of us (we called ourselves the Universities Collaborative) tried to get the foundations to consider using Appreciative Inquiry as the basis for developing strategy in Northeast Ohio. Instead, they went with an outside consultant and delivered Voices and Choices.

The thought came to me as I saw David Cooperrider’s face on the cover of a national magazine. David invented AI at Case Western Reserve.

Sometimes, the Biggest Ideas Arise when people gather together to ponder many small questions. That’s the premise behind “appreciative inquiry,” a meeting methodology that, through a focus on peer-to-peer interaction, results in tangible outcomes. AI’s creator, David Cooperrider, has had great success using the format in the corporate world, and he believes it may be the next big thing for association meetings. Meetings that think big, that is.

AI is, after all, designed to discover an organization’s strength through questioning, then come up with real-world solutions that add both to an organization’s bottom line and to society at large. Cooperrider serves as faculty director at the Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit, Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland.

Think Big

Read the rest of this entry »

This week, Smart City Radio has an interview with Ned Hill and his proposal to develop a design district in Cleveland. Listen.