Ed Morrison’s Garage

A site for early ideas on open source economic and workforce development 



January 12, 2010

Managing shrinkage: Pay attention to Youngstown

Over the last couple of years, civic leaders in the Mahoning Valley have developed a framework for collaboration.
Communities need to establish new routines where difficult challenges can be openly discussed. Cities like Youngstown, Akron, Kalamazoo and (more recently Kokomo) have established places where leaders can come together regularly to discuss the highly controversial issues surrounding managing the complex economic transformation of a shrinking city.

At the same time other places, (Detroit and Cleveland come to mind), do not have established routines for dealing with the challenges and opportunities of shrinking cities.
So, for example, in Cleveland, we see the regional transit system cutting services, the Bishop boarding up churches, the school system closing schools...and no one is talking to anyone else.
So, this contraction is taking place without any significant strategic insight. Which neighborhoods are most likely to regenerate? How do we strengthen the hubs of mixed use development? What transportation linkages are needed to support and link these hubs? What areas should be turned over to open space? How can we connect these open spaces?

Instead, we see political leaders putting their finger in the dike trying to hold back the tide. In Cleveland, the city council is now focused on the racial politics of holding on to a high school that produces more drop-outs than graduates.
How sad.

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January 5, 2010

Tuition vouchers as a "link and leverage" strategy

Here's an example of using "link and leverage" strategies across a network. In this case we are building an entrepreneurial network within the region by connecting assets within Purdue. 

I posted this note to the Economic Gardening Group this morning: 

Yesterday, I mentioned how we have used Strategic Doing to link together assets and define replicable, scalable and sustainable initiatives in our region. My colleague, Scott Hutcheson at Purdue came up with the idea of connecting tuition vouchers to a new Entrepreneurship Academy for high school students. 

Scott also developed the idea of E-BIN (Entrepreneurs Business Information Network). It ties Purdue's business library to our extension system (with offices in every county in Indiana). As you know, one big value added service provided by EG initiatives involves providing access to sophisticated business information, as well as expert guidance on how to use this information. It's a new kind of information infrastructure for an entrepreneurial economy. By leveraging resources at our business library, E-BIN makes these resources available through the extension system. 

Another small idea with potentially big results. 

To me, it comes down to this: Building an entrepreneurial economy means developing dense networks with strong cores and porous boundaries. We need strong cores of pragmatists to get stuff done and porous boundaries to stay open to new information and learning and enable "boundary spanning". 

Entrepreneurs create value from assets they do not own or control. Networks make their task of linking and leveraging these assets easier.  Entrepreneurial regions can quickly reconfigure assets through networks. Anna Lee Saxenian figured this out in her book Regional Advantage some years ago. 

Until now, though, we really haven't had a discipline in place to enable regions to learn how to develop these networks at scale. That's what Strategic Doing is all about: Building entrepreneurial networks through "link and leverage" strategies. In this way, we hope to take Economic Gardening to scale across Indiana. 

From the Purdue Today newsletter: 

 In a New York Times story on tuition vouchers, Joseph B. Hornett, senior vice president, treasurer and chief operating officer of the Purdue Research Foundation, discusses how Purdue is giving tuition vouchers as prizes for Indiana high school students and how it’s paying off.

For the past four years, the Purdue Research Foundation has awarded vouchers worth $100 to $500 to top-finishing student teams in the summer Entrepreneurship Academy. Of the 21 students given vouchers, 11 have redeemed them and enrolled at the University. This summer, the foundation will start an advanced program — a kind of M.B.A. for high school students — in which top winners will be awarded $1,000 in waivers.

“It’s not an expense at all to the University,” Hornett says.”We did this as a recruiting mechanism to get some of the best and the brightest to come to Purdue.”

The full New York Times article is available here: http://bit.ly/715MD3

Ed Morrison
Economic Policy Advisor
Purdue Center for Regional Development
cell: 216-650-7267
twitter: edmorrison

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January 5, 2010

Some more thoughts on Strategic Doing

In my post on Scaling Innovation across a network, Chris Gibbons, the founder of Economic Gardening, wrote back in the EG Google Group (http://groups.google.com/group/econ-dev)

"In our training also, we point out that nature places lots of small bets, doubles up on the winners and crossbreeds them.   It's a 4 billion year old formula for exploring a fitness landscape."

Chris' comment prompted me to write more: 

Chris: 

Thanks again for your very helpful perspective. 

The challenge, of course, is designing human systems to mimic the wisdom of natural systems. 

Each regional economy, to be adaptive, needs a process of innovation in the "civic space" outside the four walls of anyone organization. That's where we will transform the Industrial Age administrative systems in education, economic development and workforce development. We need these transformations to support the next generation high growth companies. In sum, we need to innovate a new civic infrastructure to support this growth. 

Most places do not have a civic discipline to innovate. I'm using the term "discipline" in the same way Peter Senge introduced it to us in the Fifth Discipline. "[A] body of theory and technique that must be studied and mastered to put into practice...a developmental path."  

As I mentioned, a bunch of us at Purdue have been working on Strategic Doing as a new discipline for civic innovation. The result of our approach has been significant. As you may know, we were one of 13 First Generation WIRED regions, which each received $15 million. We used these funds to stimulate a lot of different innovative experiments. Before each initiative received funding, though, we needed to be satisfied that the initiative could be replicable, scalable, and sustainable. (We used the model of the SBIR program to guide our funding formulas.) 

Using Strategic Doing as our discipline, we ended up with over fifty initiatives in four focus areas. (One initiative, as you know, involved launching economic gardening across the region with our E-BIN initiative, designed by Scott Hutcheson; it's a new approach for harnessing the power of land grant universities to economic gardening.) Each of these 50+ initiatives has metrics that enable us to  figure out what works. 

People have difficulty getting their head around two facts: First, we administer our entire WIRED region of 14 counties with one full time administrator. (We do not need more, because the disciplines of Strategic Doing emphasize transparency and mutual accountability.) Next, when DOL compared our region's productivity with the other 12 First Generation WIRED regions, we accounted for about 40% of the total production using DOL's baseline metrics. 

In other words, we demonstrated that a new model of civic innovation, one that follows, as you point out, a formula well established in natural systems, is remarkably more productive.   Now we are busy figuring out how to teach what we have learned. 

Ed

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January 5, 2010

Scaling innovation across a network

June Holley’s Twitter feed pointed me to a good post on innovation from the Innovation Leadership Network blog. The following words caught my eye:

…the way to innovate is to generate a lot of ideas, figure out ways to try them out cheaply and quickly, and then scale-up the ones that seem most promising.

This approach works particularly well in regional economic development. It is the framework we used in developing Strategic Doing at the Purdue Center for Regional Development.

We developed a discipline that enables civic entrepreneurs to test ideas quickly and then scale the ones that work. 

Meanwhile, Jack Schultz's Twitter (@jackschultz) feed led me to this fascinating interactive map. It gives a good sense of the scale of the transformation ahead. 

http://www.slate.com/id/2216238

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December 31, 2009

So what's a Strategy-Net?

We're moving ahead with deployment of a powerful and easy-to-use platform to build Strategy-Nets. These are networks designed to innovate. Unlike an interested community, a learning community or a community of practice, members of a Strategy-Net are committed to close collaboration in order to develop and launch transformative innovations.

Typically, members of a Strategy-Net are focused on transforming an important dimension of a complex system, like a regional education or workforce system, a collection of local governments, a business cluster, or an entrepreneurial ecosystem.

To be successful, the members of a Strategy-Net must engage in sustained, complex thinking. That means they need to be skilled at the practice of conducting purposeful conversations. They make strategic decisions about how to link and leverage their assets toward new opportunities. They quickly develop prototypes to test new ideas. They measure their progress, in order to figure out what works. And they design new ways of learning continuously and quickly at a low cost in both time and money.

Strategic Doing is a discipline of thinking and acting strategically within a Strategy-Net. Unlike strategic planning, a set of disciplines designed to guide complex, hierarchical organizations in relatively stable environments, Strategic Doing sets forth the disciplines needed for strategic action in open networks, in which no one can tell anyone else what to do. Strategic Doing adjusts quickly to environmental shifts because the discipline is simple, fast and iterative.

As we can figure out low-cost, productive ways to replicate, scale and sustain Strategy-Nets, we open the door to transforming the large industrial age administrative organizations -- public, private and non-profit -- that are struggling all around us. We are leaving the era of reform and entering an era of transformation: designing whole new systems for creating sustainable prosperity on a fragile planet.

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December 23, 2009

Strategy Map for Colleges and Universities

Over the past couple of days, I've been working on a new strategy map for colleges and universities to explain their emerging role in regional innovation. This work is part of a project, led by Tim Franklin at Penn State and Ted Settle at Virginia Tech to redefine how colleges and universities engage in building their regional economies.

The drawing merges the basic strategy map for Open Source Economic Development, which I have developed, with a strategy map that Tim developed at Penn State.

What's a strategy map? As we develop strategy in open networks, we move away from linear approaches to strategy ("strategic planning"). Our strategic agenda emerges from a simple framework and purposeful conversations that translate ideas into action ("strategic doing"). We describe this framework visually in strategy maps that help us keep track of conversations and understand their connections to one another.

(download)

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December 23, 2009

America’s Energy Future: Technology and Transformation

The National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council have produced an important report on the future of energy technology and policies.

Increasingly, we will see the emergence of regional energy solutions to these global challenges. Regions have the appropriate scale to design their own energy systems that minimize the dependence on fossil fuels. We are starting to see this approach as states along the Great Lakes explore the possibility of wind power.

Other examples are emerging as well. Biofuels opens the door to the development of “energy islands” that are net exporters of energy. Reynolds, IN has pursued this strategy with its BioTown development. On a broader scale, Montana is looking to develop biofuels.

New international partnerships will also form, based on these regional strategies. See, for example, North Carolina’s focus on biofuels and its emerging partnership with Canada.

Some years ago while I was at Case Western Reserve University, Holly Harlan, founder of Entrepreneurs for Sustainability and one of the best thinkers in the Northeast Ohio region, invited the Rocky Mountain Institute to make a presentation on regional energy systems.

In response to this presentation, we launched a regional energy forum to explore these issues at the Center for Regional Economic Issues. (A few years later, over in Indiana, we partnered with RMI to launch the Indiana Energy Systems Network.)

Here’s a brief preview of the NAS/NRC report:

Energy touches our lives in countless ways and its costs are felt when we fill up at the gas pump, pay our home heating bills, and keep businesses both large and small running. There are long-term costs as well: to the environment, as natural resources are depleted and pollution contributes to global climate change, and to national security and independence, as many of the world’s current energy sources are increasingly concentrated in geopolitically unstable regions. The country’s challenge is to develop an energy portfolio that addresses these concerns while still providing sufficient, affordable energy reserves for the nation.

The United States has enormous resources to put behind solutions to this energy challenge; the dilemma is to identify which solutions are the right ones. Before deciding which energy technologies to develop, and on what timeline, we need to understand them better.

America’s Energy Future analyzes the potential of a wide range of technologies for generation, distribution, and conservation of energy. This book considers technologies to increase energy efficiency, coal-fired power generation, nuclear power, renewable energy, oil and natural gas, and alternative transportation fuels. It offers a detailed assessment of the associated impacts and projected costs of implementing each technology and categorizes them into three time frames for implementation.

America’s Energy Future

The NAS has also produced a good video overview:


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December 11, 2009

Reset: Long term trends in the Midwest

Here is the download link for the Rand report that Richard Silverglitt summarized for us yesterday at the Returning Prosperity to America's Heartland Conference at Northern Illinois University:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/TR303/

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December 11, 2009

Strategy base map for the Northland Region

We're putting together a first strategy document for the Northland Region. A core element of strategy for today's region are strategy maps that guide strategic conversations.
Here's the current version of our "strategy base map" for the region.

   
Click here to download:
Strategy_base_map_for_the_Nort.zip (343 KB)

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December 11, 2009

Looking at the long term trends in the Midwest

Listening to two very good presentations that are kicking off a conference at Northern Illinois University. The first focuses on regional planning. The second focuses on the global technology revolution.

(download)

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