Representatives from EMSI, Maher & Maher, and the Newton, Iowa region will be presenting a session titled “The Integrated RIG Planning Process: Lessons From the First Regional Innovation Grant” at the U.S. Department of Labor’s Workforce Innovations 2008 conference. For those going to the conference and interested in attending the session, it is scheduled for Thursday, July 17th, at 9:30am—check your conference schedule for details.

Session summary: “Newton, Iowa and the Central Iowa region are a microcosm of the changes in the manufacturing industry. Learn how the region used workforce information intelligence and tools, along with carefully facilitated local intelligence, to form the region and lead a data-driven planning process focused on creating a different kind of economy. Understand the key aspect of ‘selling’ regionalization in an environment that is intensely political and local in its perspective.”

EMSI led the project’s economic and workforce analysis, contributing asset maps, industry focus reports, and a SWOT analysis. A summary of the session will be posted on EMSI’s web site after the conference.

Last summer, EMSI completed a study of the Walla Walla region’s wine production and tourism cluster. Recently the Wall Street Journal ran this article that focuses on the leadership of Walla Walla Community College, which is arguably responsible for the industry’s rapid growth and which has sparked numerous similar programs at other community colleges across the country.

Among the figures cited in the WSJ article is the stunning result of EMSI’s study: that the wine production and tourism industry has saved the area’s economy from stagnation or decline in the past decade, and that in the next decade over 15% of the area’s jobs will be directly or indirectly dependent on it.

The story is a stellar example of how community colleges can become leaders in economic development–with the right mix of foresight, initiative, passion, and (let’s admit it) a bit of good luck.

Read EMSI’s full report (PDF)

Walla Walla Community College, Institute for Enology and Viticulture

Walla Walla Wine Cluster Economic Development Project

Walla Walla Valley Wine Alliance

Grant County EDC in Moses Lake, Washington is an excellent example of a rural county that has excelled in recruiting a diverse mix of innovative high-tech and manufacturing firms.

Grant County EDC has met this challenge head-on with an approach that combines ambitious goals, commitment to infrastructure improvements, and detailed understanding of the region’s economy. That’s why the county is now the choice location for 19 ongoing projects, from innovative manufacturing firms to high-tech data centers for Yahoo, Ask.com, Intuit,and Microsoft. The county has dropped its unemployment rate from a 10.1% high in 2001 to a 6.6% low in 2006. And between 2006 and 2007 alone, the EDC recruited approximately 1,000 new jobs. These new jobs will be added over a five year period and will have an estimated ripple effect of 1,050 additional indirect jobs.

Click here to read the full story (PDF): “It’s All About Jobs” in Grant County

From “Firms of a Feather Flock Together,” an article on new research from Washington University in St. Louis:

“High-tech firms locating close to each other benefit from the proximity,” says Barak S. Aharonson, visiting assistant professor of organization and strategy at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. “The potential for frequent face-to-face interaction, serendipitous encounters and easy scrutiny are facilitated by being near firms that are working on similar things and are open to sharing information.”

These “knowledge spillovers” happen more frequently the closer firms are to each other, and dissipate as the distance between companies grows. In fact, Aharonson said, the benefits of agglomeration are strongest within 500 meters (about 0.31 miles) and fade quickly over distances.

This should be of interest to any area pursuing high-tech, cluster-based economic development strategies.

The Fund for Our Economic Future, a philanthropic organization in northeast Ohio, publishes a “dashboard” of the area’s economic health, as well as a detailed analysis of dozens of indicator variables used to generate the dashboard results.

The 2007 Full Report is an excellent resource for anyone interested in using socioeconomic indicators to track and improve regional competitiveness.

Today’s innovative companies are just as concerned with local workforce availability as they are with building sites and incentive packages, which is why development professionals need to be prepared to answer detailed questions about their region’s labor force: size, unemployment, industry/occupation profile, workers in similar/transferable occupations, post-secondary program capacity, and so on.

Chris Manheim, President of McHenry County EDC in northern Illinois, emphasizes that regional partnerships and collaborations, along with a having a diversified data toolkit, are critical to showing site selection consultants that his area is ready for business.

EMSI’s Strategic Advantage is one key part of this toolkit, providing MCEDC with the ability to instantly access up-to-date demographic, industry, and occupation data for its area. In a recent article in the Economic Development Administration’s Economic Development America magazine, Manheim highlighted the ability of Strategic Advantage to provide detailed employment data for local industry clusters:

Figure 2 is taken from data compiled by Economic Modeling Specialists, Inc. from a product called Strategic Advantage. This example examines local employment over the same period, but is much more in-depth than the employment data shown on the previous page. A site selector now has a snapshot of the key business clusters in your area.

Purdue University’s Center for Regional Development (CRD) and the Indiana Business Research Center, in partnership with Economic Modeling Specialists Inc., have been awarded a $350,000 grant from the Economic Development Administration to study and improve rural economic development strategies.

Results of this study will help business and government leaders throughout the nation measure innovation capacity, analyze occupational and industry clusters, and prioritize public investments based on competitive advantages in their regions. The research team also plans to test new assessment and strategic planning methods in four diverse regions of the United States. Two of the test regions will be located in Indiana. A region in southwest Wisconsin and a region spanning parts of Mississippi and Alabama also are being considered.

. . . .

U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development Sandy K. Baruah said his agency looks forward to working with Purdue, IU and Indiana officials on this project.

“Rural America is home to nearly a quarter of the nation’s people and more than half of its commercial banks. Yet, with its wide-ranging geography, the ebb and flow of its industries, and its ever-changing technological and global challenges, America’s rural economy often performs differently than the rest of the U.S. economy,” Baruah said.

Read the full press release here.

Know Your Region: An online collection of professional development curricula and other resources to help development professionals “understand and apply core concepts of regionalism and industry cluster development.” A joint project of two universities and C2ER (formerly ACCRA).

Washington State is offering regions the chance to apply for five industry-cluster-based “Innovation Partnership Zone” designations, each of which comes with  $1 million in grants to create a research park.

Minnesota is jump-starting rural economic development with an initiative called SEED (Strategic Entrepreneurial Economic Development), which is focused on small business creation.

San Francisco has spent 30 years developing a biotech / life sciences cluster, and after these decades of investment and struggle, is poised to reap the benefits.

Thanks to EDPro for rounding up these and other great stories.

Corporate incentive packages have long been a standard economic development tool, but regional leaders are giving them increasing scrutiny following well-publicized reports of incentive deals gone bad (see, for example, the regular “Incentive Watch” entries on Ed Morrison’s EDPro blog).

Now Bob Orr, a North Carolina gubernatorial candidate, is promising to slash generous tax and cash incentives (especially involving intra-state competition for businesses), increase the transparency of the incentive process, and divert more state funding specifically to employer-customized workforce training.

RALEIGH, N.C. — An end to economic incentives programs and more money for worker training are among the goals of Bob Orr, a former state Supreme Court justice who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor.

Orr, who is leading a lawsuit challenging economic incentives for Dell Inc., said Monday that if elected he’ll work to bar local governments from using special payments or tax breaks to lure existing companies elsewhere in the state to relocate. County and city officials also would have to make public more details about incentive deals before they are considered, he said.

Link to article.