Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke recently gave this speech at an awards ceremony of the Charlotte, NC chamber of commerce. His remarks provide an interesting overview of the great challenges and transformations experienced by the region’s economy in recent years, including the decline of textile manufacturing and the explosive growth of professional and business services, financial services, health care, leisure and hospitality, high-tech and R&D, and niche manufacturing. He concluded his remarks with a plug for higher education, with a particular nod to the North Carolina Community College System.

Over all, the speech covers in microcosm many of the similar issues facing regional economies across the U.S.

LesLe: A repository of resources on community and economic development compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Some interesting highlights:

•  HUD’s Office of University Partnerships
• NGA’s Growth and Quality of Life Toolkit
• USDA’s Rural Development Success Stories

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 Idaho Division of Professional-Technical Education participates in the States’ Career Cluster Initiative to improve student engagement, learning outcomes, and secondary-postsecondary linkages while making efficient use of teaching resources.

The agency disseminates a number of useful career cluster materials on its web site, including labor market data organized by cluster, which is produced using EMSI’s Strategic Advantage tool. In doing so, Idaho joins a growing number of career and professional-tech schools and agencies which are leveraging data to ensure that curricula are aligned with the labor market.

This document is a short working paper produced jointly by Central Arizona College and EMSI/CCbenefits Inc. It describes data sources and research methods to help colleges determine a region’s labor market needs and adjust programs accordingly.

Download the full document here (PDF hosted by Central Arizona College).

EMSI/CCbenefits has just completed a major study of the socioeconomic impact of Maryland’s community colleges, commissioned by the Maryland Association of Community Colleges. The project included individual studies for 14 participating institutions, in addition to an aggregate report highlighting the impact of the system as a whole.

While EMSI’s policy is not to release specific results from its clients’ studies, this study did find that the Maryland system of 2-year colleges yields a significant return on investment and positive benefit/cost ratio to its students and to state taxpayers.

EMSI’s comprehensive socioeconomic impact (SEIM) study detailed several benefits of Maryland’s colleges:

• Economic impact of colleges’ operational spending and out-of-region student/visitor spending in their local economies;
• Economic impact of increased student earnings attributable to their education (EMSI studies frequently find that this is a very large and often ignored component of a college’s impact); and
• Social savings (health, employment, lifestyle choices) statistically attributable to postsecondary education.

EMSI/CCbenefits SEIM studies treat education as an investment for students and taxpayers alike, and include an investment analysis from both perspectives.

UPDATE: See even more client snapshots here.

Current and prospective clients sometimes ask EMSI how their peers are using Strategic Advantage. To help with this knowledge-sharing, we’re pleased to publish a handful of customer experiences that demonstrate some of the real-world solutions enabled by Strategic Advantage (SA) in the fields of economic development, workforce investment, and education. We hope that current and prospective SA users find them useful and inspiring. [Disclaimer: EMSI has received permission to publish these case studies for informational purposes. They should not be interpreted as constituting an official or unofficial endorsement from the organizations listed.]

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