27 Jan 2012

Linking and leveraging university assets to strengthen regional economies

On Sunday, we are launching our week-log Strategic Doing certification course at Purdue. The first class -- 23 economic and workforce development professionals -- draws from Indiana. We are focused on making our 14 county region around Purdue a hot spot for intensive collaboration using the new strategy disciplines for open networks. 

Extending collaboration has been a focus at Purdue since former President Martin Jischke appointed Vic Lechtenberg to lead the effort. Purdue has launched Discovery Park, an expanded Purdue Technical Assistance Program, and the Purdue Center for Regional Development, among other initiatives. The process continues. Last week, Purdue announced a new Innovation and Commercialization Center. 

Strategic doing provides a disciplined framework for extending these collaborations, a kind of core technology to designing and managing complex collaborations in open, loosely connected networks. 

We are building a national network of universities committed to this new discipline. So, for example, Michigan State is using this discipline in its engagement activities and Arizona State has used strategic doing to design its initiatives to build a solar cluster in Arizona. Virginia Tech is collaborating with Purdue to incorporate strategic doing in a new executive education course on regional engagement, through its Engagement Academy. The Virginia Tech course -- scheduled for May -- is designed to help regional leaders link and leverage their university assets to strengthen competitiveness. 

The University of Akron is collaborating with Purdue, Michigan State, Arizona State and the University of Michigan, among others, to create a platform to explore federal policies to support extended collaboration among higher education, business, government, and non-profits. The discipline of strategic doing sits at the core of this new network focused on Transformative Regional Engagement. 

In the coming months, we'll be announcing details of a national initiative to bring the disciplines of strategic doing to national scale. Michigan  State, The University of Akron and Arizona State have been at the core of this effort.  

One of the important opportunities comes in transforming the Great Lakes economy, where we have the highest concentration of colleges and universities in the country. In an important paper, James Duderstadt, past president of the University of Michigan, has explored this core strength of the Great Lakes economy.  

In the most recent issue of Michigan State's Engaged Scholar magazine,  I explore the possibilities of the practical dimensions of how we can build collaborations across organizational and political boundaries with a common strategic framework and a simple discipline to manage this complexity. 

Click here to download:
A Master Plan for Higher Education.pdf (4.43 MB)
(download)

Click here to download:
Strategic Doing Engaged ScholarWEB 2011.pdf (2.02 MB)
(download)

13 Jan 2012

Forming a new creative media cluster in Shreveport by following some simple lessons

Shreveport

We have been hearing a lot about regional innovation clusters lately. The Obama administration, bolstered with policy work by Brookings and the Center for American Progress, have been integrating federal programs in an effort to promote these clusters. The Economic Development Administration has launched a new website designed to connect clusters and create a new type of "infrastructure" to support this strategy. At Purdue, we have done a lot of work developing interactive tools to identify and analyze clusters. You can check them out on our regional innovation web site. 

Yet, when it comes to actually designing and launching regional innovation clusters -- "activating" clusters -- we are at a very early stages of developing a professional practice. We have just now started the work of developing protocols, disciplines and frameworks in order to make these practices replicable, scalable and sustainable.  

We should not be discouraged that our work in activation lags our advances in analysis. Activating regional innovation clusters -- designing and launching them -- represents a formidable challenge. We need to integrate insights from large group intervention practices (like Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space, the World Cafe and Asset-Based Community Development) with new strategy disciplines (Strategic Doing), lessons from open source software development, new tools (like social network analysis), and traditional financial, marketing and project management. While we're at it, we need to throw in a few insights from the rapidly evolving field of complex adaptive systems (one of my favorite books on the topic -- Managing the Unknowable -- describes the fog in which we must operate). Is it any wonder that there are cynics in the grandstand? In truth, as a recent analysis out of Europe demonstrates, most cluster initiatives do not work very well.  

This weak record of accomplishment does not mean that developing clusters is not a worthy policy. No, the path is just fraught with difficulties. 

For the past year, I have been working on the Space Coast in Florida promoting the development of a clean energy cluster. That experience has helped me understand how we can use the disciplines of Strategic Doing to accelerate the development of regional innovation clusters.

Here are some simple lessons. 

The most effective approach to designing and launching regional innovation clusters is privately-led and publicly-supported, not the other way around. (When the public sector tries to lead cluster development, the result is usually a mess.) This principle carries significant implications for how initial meetings are structured and how conversations are framed and guided. 

Company executives who initially engage in cluster development are impatient. We are dealing with tight time constraints, usually no more than 2 hours. Within that window of opportunity, we need to demonstrate the tangible value that can come from sharing non-proprietary information and building new collaborations from shared assets. 

We can illustrate this point with that example from creative media cluster that is beginning to form in Shreveport, Louisiana. My colleague, Kim Mitchell, led an initial meeting of a new creative media cluster yesterday. He saw how government representatives and staff from economic development organizations can, without some guidance, take over  the conversation. They can quickly move it in a largely irrelevant, confusing direction. 

By inserting himself into the conversation, Kim was able to steer the focus back to defining new market opportunities. In Florida, to deal with this problem, we adopted the practice of bi-furcating our meetings. In the first half, industry members sat around the table and support organizations observed. In the second half of the meeting, support organization representatives joined the conversation to address the agenda items outlined by the private sector representatives. 

Here's another lesson. Among the different collaborations that can arise, we want to select those that have a relatively large potential impact and that are relatively easy to do. As we demonstrated in the Arizona Solar Summit, we can use these two dimensions to select priorities quickly. 

Finally, we need to work with a thirty day time horizon. If we cannot accomplish tangible progress in the thirty days after a meeting, no one will come to the next one. The good news in Shreveport: the founding members of the cluster agreed to come back together again in two weeks. 

13 Jan 2012

The role of universities in promoting new strategies of transformation

The folks at Michigan State have become big supporters of Strategic Doing. The Memorandum of Understanding between Purdue and Michigan State sets the groundwork for a national network of colleges and universities committed to teaching this discipline.
We are moving faster than we anticipated in establishing this network. Right now, over ten universities have expressed interest in anchoring this network. While we were initially focused on the Great Lakes, our network has grown nationally. We will be announcing more details in the coming months.

To set the stage for developing the network, Michigan State asked for an article on Strategic Doing for their Engaged Scholar magazine.

Click here to download:
Morrison Engaged Scholar WEB 2011.pdf (476 KB)
(download)

Ed Morrison's Space

For some time now, I've been working on new, open innovation models for transforming our civic economy. We've got some complex transformations ahead, but we can develop remarkable collaborations by following some simple rules.

Here are some places where you can find my work. This blog outlines some early thinking on the application of open innovation and Strategic Doing to the challenge of transforming our civic economy.

Purdue Center for Regional Development

The Purdue Center for Regional Development has become the hot spot for this work. Learn more.

Purdue keeps track of trends in economic development on the EDPro Weblog. You can also browse through the PCRD blog. You can also connect with PCRD on our Facebook page.

To learn more about what Purdue is doing in developing these models, including the workshops and presentations we provide, please connect with Peggy Hosea

Strategy-Nets

A spin-out from my work at Purdue, Strategy-Nets extends the work on open innovation in the civic economy to provide additional tools, strategy frameworks, and advisory services to communities and regions looking to improve their ability to develop and guide strategic collaborations. You can learn more about Strategy-Nets by connecting with Punit Chabbra

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