| "Rich Karlgaard wowed our audience of
1,200 with stories about entrepreneurs he met while air-hopping around
the country. The icing on the cake is Karlgaard's ability to cleverly
weave into those stories his own strategic view of business and innovation." --Rich Hadley, President, Greater Spokane Chamber of Commerce |
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| Message to Economic Developers | ||
| Gay people are the magic key to economic vitality! says Richard Florida—the John Heinz III Professor of Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Why, look at Manhattan, San Francisco and Miami's South Beach, says Prof. Florida. A lively civic gay life is a marker for creativity and is proof of a willingness to flout convention. Both qualities are needed to grow a thriving entrepreneurial environment. | ||
| No, no, no, says another expert in regional economic development, Ross DeVol of Santa Monica, California's Milken Institute. It's capital that counts. Intellectual capital, which you can measure by toting up the number of Ph.Ds and patents held in the community, and good old-fashioned money capital, particularly R&D money and venture capital. Put these two forms of capital together within breeding distance and you'll soon get the next Google or eBay. | ||
| Aw, you both have your heads in the clouds, gruffs Walter Plosila, a meat-and-potatoes guy who runs the Battelle Institute's Center for Regional Economic Development in a five-story building near Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. Plosila earns his keep counseling cities such as Peoria and Indianapolis—"blue collar" cities trying to shake off their gritty manufacturing pasts. Forget the fancy pants stuff, Plosila says. What's needed is hard realism and civic leadership. | ||
| Well now! | ||
| The war of economic development theories begins to sound comical after you've heard all sides speak with the convincing fervor of religious fanatics. The stakes, however, are not trivial. There are 531 cities in the U.S. with a population size greater than 50,000, and 2,364 others between 25,000 and 50,000. All of the former and most of the latter employ full-time economic development administrators. (And that's not counting the more than 7,000 chapters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. | ||
| Add to these city efforts the heftier 50 state development agencies (some of which, like California's, employ thousands) and scores of regional groups, such as the one promoting the "Quad Cities" that join into a single economic player: Moline and Rock Island (twin cities in Illinois) and Bettendorf and Davenport (twin cities right across the Mississippi River in Iowa). Some of these alliances would form new U.S. states, if so permitted, were the boundaries to be drawn today to accurately reflect natural regional interests. Eastern Washington state has more in common with the panhandle of northern Idaho than it does with its urban coastal cousins in Seattle. The Greater Spokane Chamber of Commerce, in fact, sometimes includes Moscow, Idaho in its promotions—a city more than 70 miles away. | ||
| Toss in such 21st century players linked around university research parks (there is an Association for American University Parks, as a matter of fact) and the enviro-friendly, high-value industries they hope to attract, such as software and biotech. Thus you will find acting in concert an archipelago of high-IQ cities such as Davis, Calif., Madison, Wisc., and Raleigh-Durham, N.C. | ||
| Put it all together and pretty soon you have something close to a $20 billion dollar U.S. industry of regional economic development! | ||
| City competing against city. | ||
| State against state. | ||
| Region against region. | ||
| So which American cities, towns and regions will do best during the 21st century? | ||
| Recently I sat down with Rick Weddle, chairman of the International Economic Development Council, in his Phoenix office. Rick told me that his 4,000-plus members felt their ability to predict the future, and the future of their own cities and regions, was clouded by the extremely disruptive nature of today's technology and information driven economy. | ||
| Add to that the impact of politics. And the potential threat of terrorism. And God knows what else. | ||
| I have developed some strong hunches based on my travels, book research, and from talking and corresponding with thousands of Americans on this subject. Many of the people I've talked to have recently voted with their feet. Their stories are revealing. | ||
| Which leads me to say . . . I am certainly no academic like Richard Florida, Ross DeVol, Walt Posila, or Joel Kotkin. These guys do core research and are brilliant at it. | ||
| Me? I talk to people and collect stories and sometimes share them with Forbes readers. When I see patterns emerging, I develop some theories. That is what I did in Life 2.0, and that is what I would like to share with you. | ||
| Contact me at:rich@life2where.com | ||
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