By Teresa A. Martin
This week I was Out & About to the Regional Innovation Summit at MIT, an event that looked at New England as a competitive region, with a focus on the innovation economy and technology transfer as part of the engine of growth. It was pretty interesting stuff.
There is, at the national economic level, a strong pressure on regions of the county to work as, well, cohesive regions. Here on the Cape, our notion of region tends to be, err, compact. The Council on Competitiveness, in contrast, sees regions that are something much more macro – say, like, New England.
It struck me that this push makes a lot of sense ... but it also means it is increasingly important for our micro regions of the Cape, Islands, and SE MA to both coordinate our economic and business outreach efforts and to be highly proactive about it.
During the energy & environment working session, for example, the maps on the wall really brought this notion home. In preparation, moderators had put red dots on locations with areas of economic activity around energy, alternative energy, and sustainable energy industry development. The red dots where places where research was happening and business was being developed around these sectors. The Cape was blank. Not one single solitary red dot. Of course, we all know the Cape is NOT devoid of sustainable energy and environmental companies – but we are invisible in the larger landscape.
If that weren’t enough, the kicker was a brief conversation with someone from the Department of Commerce, up for the day from Washington DC. “Oh yeah the Cape,” she said. “Don’t you do something with cranberries there?”
I looked at her. And I said “Arrrghhhhhh!!!!”
Hah. No, I didn’t really say that. What I really did was smile with grace and courtesy and briefly explained that there is more to the Cape than beaches and berries.
Now I don’t mean to sound like I’m bashing our micro-region. In fact, I learned that the way we work as a micro-region here pretty much mirrors the New England mindset. That is, we are somewhat fractured and we don’t exactly excel at integrating our thinking or establishing and marketing our brand.
Deborah Wince-Smith, CEO of the Council on Competitiveness stated that quite clearly in her opening remarks: “Regions don’t act regionally. They don’t knit together economic development, workforce, education ... and other issues,” she said, adding that this integration is what creates competitive innovation hotspots.
“Knowledge and information are baseline commodities,” she continued. “What you do with these is to create transformation innovation. The new economy is the conceptual economy that combines insight, judgment, quantitative skills, humanities ... to meet the demands of consumers and solve the problems of humankind.”
Phew! That’s a pretty tall order but the bottom line seems to be that everything we do is inter-related and we’re not going to be able to compete successfully if we keep each element of our community separate. Or, to say it a simple old-fashioned way, the whole is stronger than the sum of its parts.
Another term which surfaced over and over again was “ecosystem” – and folks were not referring to trees and little green lizards. “We need an innovative ecosystem,” said Linda Sanford, Senior VP at IBM. “Concrete initiatives at regional levels can spark innovation and new thinking – we have seen this work in New York.”
But my favorite way of presenting this concept came from Mike Reopel, a principal at Deloitte Consulting. “This is a systems integration issue” he said.
He identified five growth engines that have to be aligned for a region to perform at peak competitive level. First, is the infrastructure cost and availability – the base cost of doing business in a location. What connects people to jobs and housing? Low cost rail? Highway? Where is broadband access available –- and is there understanding that this is a necessity and not optional?
Second is the education infrastructure, including private, public, and community colleges. What is the collaboration among these? And between these and other elements of the region?
Third is a regional brand. He said that the importance of defining and communicating this cannot be understated, and pointed out that investment put into branding for all of New England is one-third of what Virginia (a high growth region) alone spent. “This isn’t advertising for tourism,” he said emphatically, “but for investment.” And our brand should be this: Innovation, skilled labor, smart engineering, all linked.
Fourth is the demographics, which includes everything from retaining graduate students to having a diverse workforce willing and able to work at all levels.
Finally, perhaps the most critical engine is network collaboration. “This is the interconnectedness of the capacity builders of the region -- and if you examine the county regionally, what you’ll find is that there is much more interconnectedness in the high growth regions,” he said.
Systems integration. Getting all the engines firing in coordination with one another, aware of each other, and working together. Innovation, it seems, does not exist alone.
I guess that is something we all know. But the challenge, of course, lies in the execution. None of us has the answers alone but together there's a way we can build our path to the “conceptual economy,” that economy of re-creation and innovation that is shaping the 21st century of our lives.
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