Brewed Fresh Daily

On Tuesday, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced details of the Seattle Jobs Plan, a vision for next-generation economic development in Seattle and the Puget Sound region. The plan consists of a framework of new and existing policies, programs, engagement strategies, and investments that McGinn hopes will help create quality jobs, protect the environment, and provide for more open, transparent government.


Seattle Jobs Plan 2010





Facebook and Twitter capture our social lives on the web — building a “social layer” on top of the real world.

At TEDxBoston, Seth Priebatsch presented the next layer in progress: the “game layer,” a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape education and commerce.

A number of years ago, a group of us, including David Demming, Michael DeAlioa and David Moss, tried to get NorTech and others to understand that Cleveland — with the Institute of Art — had an early start in gaming, and that we should build on this advantage. CIA launched an incubator, Future. I-Open, a non-profit spin-out that formed after the Weatherhead School shut down the Center for Regional Economic Issues, even held a couple of DeFrag conferences to connect resources from throughout the state to Cleveland.

Most of this has disappeared from the web. All I could find was a 2006 story on the CIA web site. Nothing much happened. Cleveland’s top-down mindsets and relative inability to build collaborative enterprises carries real consequences in lost opportunities.

Maybe now, with new leadership at NorTech, there’s still an opportunity. Others have already seen it:
Georgia a hotspot in video game development

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Addendum:

Rhode Island recently launched a strategy to build a cluster of interactive game companies. As part of that effort, Well Fargo Securities prepared a report. Here’s one slide on the market opportunity:

Here’s a presentation made to the RI Economic Development Corporation on the cluster.


Game Cluster Report for Rhode Island


The recently leaked financials of the Pittsburgh Pirates illustrates how the Dolans can make money by fielding a lousy team and having the worst attendance in baseball.

MLB is obviously upset at the news that you can have a really bad team and still make a ton of money: The Business Of Baseball Is Very Good.

Leaked Documents Provide Glimpse Behind Baseball’s Financial Curtain

Given the dependence of the PD on Indians’ ad revenues, we may not see too much reporting on this issue locally. The Miami Herald is reporting on the Marlins, another team with leaked financial statements. In Miami, outrage over a stadium deal has boiled over.

Over at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson sees the Pirates as a commentary on a larger theme:
How Baseball’s Worst Team Explains the U.S. Economy

You can keep up with the Indians over at WahooBlues.

Youngstown is all over the news. From Youngstown Business Incubator CEO & Chief Executive Jim Cossler: The Youngstown Business Incubator, after a recent feature story in Inc. magazine and a feature broadcast by the BBC, is once again the subject of national coverage. This time in the current edition of Bloomberg Businessweek where the magazine [...]

“[E]arlier this week, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing announced his new campaign to revitalize the city. While the details of the plan will primarily depend on public input, the Mayor has boldly challenged his constituents and city officials to think differently about redeveloping a shrinking city. Like many other mayors of shrinking cities, Bing is beginning to embrace the new era of downsizing. Youngstown, Ohio and Flint, Michigan have paved the way for how we think about redevelopment in this new era. They have torn down blighted homes to create more green space and have consolidated city services with inner-ring suburbs to save tax dollars…”

Why Cleveland Matters: Detroit’s Master Plan

Entrepreneur looks at Melt’s big marketing scheme (get a Melt-themed tattoo and get 25 percent off for life) and how they keep the promotion going. The article, “Big Marketing Stunts, Small-Business Style,” takes a peek at marketing stunts from places around the nation. Read FacebookTwitterDiggItDel.icio.us

Who hasn’t wanted to throw a Rubik’s Cube out the window in sheer frustration? Surely not Dr. Morley Davidson, an associate professor of mathematical sciences @ Kent State Univ. Not only has he cracked the Cube, he’s unveiled new research that finds that every position of the Rubik’s Cube can be solved in 20 moves [...]

Cleveland is becoming a nationally recognized hot spot for new cooperatives, thanks to Evergreen Cooperatives. Earlier this month, Ted Howard spoke at the bi-annual meeting of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives.

Here’s how the Berkeley Daily Planet reported it:

The United Nations has recognized and encouraged this growth, and has asked all governments to form a partnership with the cooperative movement to solve the global problems of unemployment and poverty, problems that the current economic system is not structured to solve, and that are poised to engulf the world in disasters of enormous magnitudes. The UN has declared 2012 the International Year of Cooperatives….

Another speaker, Ted Howard, is an architect of the Evergreen Cooperative Initiative of Cleveland, a nonprofit launched in 2008, with a mission of stabilizing and revitalizing six low-income neighborhoods in that city, with 43,000 residents and a median household income of $18,5000. Their cooperative development strategy leverages a portion of the annual procurement expenditures of anchor institutions such as local hospitals and universities, into the surrounding neighborhoods to create new co-op businesses and jobs. The first two Evergreen cooperatives, Evergreen Cooperative Laundry and Ohio Cooperative Solar, are both successfully launched, and two more co-op businesses are in their pipeline for this year. They plan an integrated network of 10 cooperatives with approximately 500 worker-owners, within 3 years.

Worker Co-ops Descend on Berkeley

You can learn more about Evergreen Cooperatives from their web site.

A business-led group in Wisconsin recently proposed moving that state’s economic development activities to a quasi-public body, Accelerate Wisconsin. This morning, two business school deans came out in favor of the proposal.

You can read the initiative in the report below. Pay particular attention to the operation and governance proposed (pages 34-36).


Wisconsin Competitiveness Study


It’s hard to see how Cleveland will make the transition to a smart economy when the city’s schools are not getting the basics right.

That’s the same challenge emerging in other cities. Two newspapers are running investigative series that are useful.

The Los Angeles Times is publishing an investigative report that tries to rank teacher quality by improvement in test scores. The investigations uses value-added analysis, which rates teachers based on their students’ progress on standardized tests from year to year.

Grading the Teachers: Who’s teaching L.A.’s kids?

Among the findings:

Highly effective teachers routinely propel students from below grade level to advanced in a single year.

Although many parents fixate on picking the right school for their child, it matters far more which teacher the child gets. Teachers had three times as much influence on students’ academic development as the school they attend. Yet parents have no access to objective information about individual instructors, and they often have little say in which teacher their child gets.

This morning the Columbus Dispatch published results of its evaluation of the region’s high schools.

When an A isn’t enough
Numbers aren’t adding up to success

Among the findings:

Despite earning good grades and taking honors courses in high school, many students find themselves ill-prepared for college.

Statewide, 39 percent of about 52,000 first-year public college students took at least one remedial course in 2008.

Remedial classes – which cost as much as other college classes but don’t provide credit toward a degree – make the road to a college degree more of an uphill climb. Students can drain their financial aid to pay for developmental classes. It takes them longer to earn a degree. And they are more likely to drop out.