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