May 18, 2010

Remarks at the White House Summit on Auto Communities &

the New Economy
Scott Hutcheson, Purdue University

I want to spend just a few minutes with you this afternoon to talk
about what we’ve learned, in Indiana, over the last few years, about
regional innovation. In 2005, our Purdue Center for Regional
Development was asked to help a group of strong local leaders from
mostly rural communities in the region, figure out how they could
work together across municipal boundaries to transform the regional
economy.

Slowly at first, and later with amazing speed, we began to see

remarkable innovations occur and when the recession hit us, we had
already figured out how to function as a high-performing regional civic
network that could quickly identify innovative solutions and then link
and leverage our regional assets to launch new strategies.

The hub or our regional network remains Purdue University with

additional members at the core like other colleges and universities,
our local economic development organizations, SBDC, our regional
workforce board, and our tech parks and incubators along with state
and federal partners like EDA, DOL, NIST, and philanthropic partners
like our local community foundations and the Kauffman Foundation.

Most of our responses to the economic crisis seamlessly integrated

the perspectives and resources of (1) workforce development, (2)
economic development, and (3) business development helping both
individuals and firms re-engage with the restructuring economy.

This notion of “economic re-engagement,” was just one of the

innovative approaches we developed. We recognized that in a
restructuring regional economy, where both workers and firms find
themselves disengaged, there are multiple pathways for them to re-
engage with that shifting economy, and there is a different set of
resources that needs to be aligned to move them through each
pathway. I’d like to stop now and show you a part of a video we
produced that illustrates just one of these re-engagement pathways.

Start Video @ 17 second mark and end @ the 6 min 22 mark

where Don McCreary says, “…bringing the people with the
money together with the people who potentially need the
money...”

1
 May 18, 2010

The rest of that story is available on YouTube and see me if you want
a link to it. The story goes on to describe the impact thus far with
several new businesses being formed and dozens of jobs being
created.

Now this is just one of about 60 different stories that I could tell you
today. Over the course of the last four years we’ve launched over 60
different initiatives all focused around four strategic objectives, some
of our metrics include training of over 25,000 individuals, over 3,600
unemployed workers placed in jobs within our targeted industries,
nearly 2,000 degrees and certifications awarded, many of which for
new programs we developed like a certificates in Nano-structured
Coatings Technologies and Green Manufacturing, $2.1 million in
industry cost savings from energy efficiency programs, 18 new
products launched and $1.7 million in top-line sales growth by
existing businesses, and 10 new businesses created. Over 80% of the
initiatives we launched are continuing on today.

We are now going all over the country teaching other regions how to
create these civic networks that can launch and sustain innovative
strategies and programs. We have five principles we think are key
when doing this sort of regional transformation work:

1. You can’t wait for a crisis to engage in region building

2. You have to go slow before you go fast
3. Strategic Doing is just as important as Strategic Planning
(probably even more so)
4. Throw out the org chart and replace it with a Network Map
5. Focus on assets rather than deficits

I was asked today to also provide my opinion about how the federal
and philanthropic partners here today could best assist in this
transformation of our auto communities and I’ll leave you with four
pieces of advice:

1. Focus federal and philanthropic policies, programs, and

resources toward promoting regional civic innovation networks;
2. Look to “hub” organizations like universities, that span election
cycles, to help build these regional networks;
3. Create a strong platform to collaborate across regions to learn
what works so that Kokomo can learn from Youngstown, and
Youngstown can learn from Detroit; and
4. Provide “seed financing” to launch promising pilots.