PCRD

Baby Boomers Migration and Rural America

A very large cohort of population, the so called baby boomers, people born between 1946 and 1964 will be entering their retirement phase. In doing so, they will create migration pathways, which will affect the rural America. A recent study by the Economic Research Service (ERS), USDA, says that the baby boom migration will favor rural America because of the scenic amenities and the low cost housing. If this generation follows similar migration patterns, the rural population age 55-75 will increase by 30 percent between 2010 and 2020 according to the ERS. The baby boomers now aged between 45 and 63 is a large cohort of 83 million people, almost a quarter of the total U.S. population. Historically, this will be the largest cohort going out of the labor force. They have demonstrated affinity for the small town and rural areas. Such migration patterns will bring significant socio-economic changes and opportunities for the small towns and rural areas. Read the article and related research here

US Dept. of Commerce Creates New Innovation Office

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced his plans to create a new Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship within the Department of Commerce.  The office will focus on the following areas:

• Encouraging Entrepreneurs through Education, Training, and Mentoring
• Improving Access to Capital
• Accelerating Technology Commercialization of Federal R&D
• Strengthening Interagency Collaboration and Coordination
• Providing Data, Research, and Technical Resources for Entrepreneurs
• Exploring Policy Incentives to Support Entrepreneurs and Investors

In addition the Commerce Secretary launched a new advisory council to support the new Innovation and Entrepreneurship Office entitled the: National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Both substantial new initiatives will help leverage the entire federal government on behalf of promoting entrepreneurship in America.

Posted by Don Koverman

2009 Indiana Cooperative Summit – Register Today!

You won’t want to miss the 2009 Indiana Cooperative Summit! Scheduled for November 10 at the Hendricks County Fairgrounds in Danville, Indiana; this dynamic meeting will serve as a showcase for the power of cooperatives and the “cooperative advantage”.  For more information call 317-692-7707 or to register online go to: www.icdc.coop .

Posted by Don Koverman

50 Most Innovative Companies

The 50 most innovative companies in the world according to BusinessWeek magazine.  Interesting note that half are headquartered in the United States.

Posted by Susan Davis

Regulate Venture Capitalists?

Congress is heating up discussions on new legislative proposals that would require private pools of investment capital to be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This is being prompted as an attempt to limit further risks to the financial system. More here.

Posted by Susan Davis

Marshall Plan for the Midwest?

Richard Longworth laments the Midwest's inability to work together on a regional basis and suggests the incentive for doing so may be a Midwest Marshall Plan   http://www.stlbeacon.org/in_the_news/modern_marshall_plan_for_midwest

Green Economy - See for Yourself!

This morning on the way to work and listening to PBS, I learned of a new website that allows visitors to input their assumptions about the likelihood of various future energy policies being implemented and then calculates the resulting effect on the Gross Domestic Product and economic growth in the US.  This neat little trick is the product of a "meta-analysis" synthesizing the 27 leading economic models by Robert Repetto of Yale University who writes that the synthesis "... reveals what the crucial assumptions are and how changing those assumptions affects the predicted economic costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by specific percentages below the business-as-usual path by 2030. Surprisingly, only a handful of key assumptions account for most of the differences among model predictions of the economic costs of reducing emissions."

Check the results of your own assumptions at http://www.climate.yale.edu/seeforyourself/ - and See For Yourself!

Want to Go Green? Green Jobs, Green Economy Resources

The topic of "going green," green jobs and the green economy is not just potentially enormous and all-encompassing - it IS enormous and just about all-encompassing!  For those who want to start researching and understanding the possibilities, those who want to focus and those who are confused, a couple of sources that you may not yet have come across can be helpful.

One of these is the EMSI Resource Library mentioned in my previous post - only this time, you will want to go to the Whitepapers section economicmodeling.com/resources/whitepapers where you will find a series of five Green Jobs papers, with likely more to come. 

Another site is Americangreenjobs.net a participatory website that "..focuses on bringing together government, business, academic and nonprofit leaders involved in the identification and development of green jobs and the preparation and training of workers needed to support them.  Supported by EPA and the Department of Labor, this web site will serve as the central hub for information dissemination and collaboration among individuals and organizations interested in all aspects of green job development and support. AmericanGreenJobs.net will enable users to share information and best practices, map data, exchange resources and ideas, and collaborate on new and existing projects as well as other activities."

All PCRD Blog readers are invited to send in any other web resources that they know of that would be useful resources for would-be Green practitioners!

Knowledge Economy still needs all skill levels....

A useful report referenced in the EMSI Resource Library recently (http://www.economicmodeling.com/resources/) talks about the continuing need for middle skill level workers in large metropolitan areas such as Chicago: "To raise awareness of job opportunities for Chicago-area displaced workers in the midst of a deep recession, a consortium of nine regional workforce boards has released a study that emphasizes the continuing demand for middle-skill workers. 'While policymakers continue to focus on the need for high-skill workers,' the report states, 'the need for middle-skill workers must also be addressed through workforce development policies and initiatives.  According to the study completed by the Workforce Boards of Metropolitan Chicago, 43% of the region's jobs are of the middle-skill variety - that is, jobs that require some post-high school training or education but less than a batchelor's degree."

To access the full article in the EMSI Resource Library, go here http://www.economicmodeling.com/resources/category/analysis-reports/. To access the full report, click here

http://www.workforceboardsmetrochicago.org/index.asp

Strategic Doing in Michigan's auto communities

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Aristotle

About ten days ago, members of the President's auto communities task force asked a group of us from Purdue to guide a collaboration acceleration session in Lansing, MI. 

With all the funding going into Michigan, federal officials from the U.S. Departments of Commerce and Labor wanted to find some new approaches to accelerating collaborations among their partners in Michigan. They turned to us and we employed Strategic Doing for the job. 

Strategic Doing is a disciplined, practical process for developing and implementing strategies in open, loosely connected networks (like a regional economy). The steps are simple to understand, but not easy for groups to follow. Conversations in loosely connected groups are difficult to guide (think cat herding). To create effective collaborations, we must think clearly, communicate concisely, and stay focused on translating ideas into action.

Innovative (and often complex) initiatives take sophisticated thinking and a commitment to learn from experience. We also need reservoirs of trust to execute quickly, so we can figure out "What works". 

Strategic Doing, in the end, enables us to do complex projects by following some simple rules. The trick comes in following the rules. Like any new habit, practice matters a lot.

You can look at a resource page for the participants of the Lansing, MI workshop here.

If you are interested in learning more about network-based approaches to economic and workforce development, check out Purdue's new certificate course in Open Source Economic Development. To learn more about this course, please connect with Peggy Hosea at phosea@purdue.edu