Washington:  Battered for decades by the loss of manufacturing, the outmigration of talented workers, and a sluggish entrepreneurial spirit, the states and metropolitan areas of the Great Lakes region have long struggled to remake the area's once powerful economy.  The region still lacks the venture capital investments needed to help translate the huge amount of innovation these assets generate into the high value firms, products, and services that, as the Great Recession recedes, will define the next economy.  The dearth of venture capital has not gone unnoticed, and over the years several states in the region have undertaken initiatives designed to encourage innovative start-up companies, entrepreneurship, and venture capital formation.

This paper presents investors, community leaders, and governmental officials with a venture capital strategy aimed at helping the Great Lakes region successfully overcome these challenges. It is based on the premise that Great Lakes region has several of the key prerequisites for successful venture investing-including the capacity to create innovative products and services that can become investable deals, a knowledgeable investor community, and a growing support structure that can help lower investor risks and costs-but that concerted, collaborative actions by a range of stakeholders are needed to create and sustain a virtuous cycle of venture investment, entrepreneurship, and firm growth in the region.

For a downloadable copy of the report, click here.

Lancaster: On Wednesday, February 17, the PA CareerLink of Lancaster County hosted US Senator Robert Casey as he visited Lancaster County to find out more information about the affect of stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Executive Director Scott Sheely of the Lancaster County Workforce Investment Board spoke with Casey about new learning about service delivery that came from the stimulus investments, including the absolute necessity of including workforce readiness in the system, connecting adult basic education and English as second language to skill training, and using shorter-term training courses in the programming mix.

With the help of PA CareerLink staff, Sheely and PA CareerLink Site Administrator Lori Rank talked to the Senator about the community investments that have been made in youth programs, Ready2Work, pre-employment training, Individual Training Acccounts, and Job Club. Lancaster Mayor Rick Gray explained the joint City-WIB program to provide contruction training to young people while rehabilitating houses in the City. Casey visited Ready2Work and spoke to young people who are participants in the Winter Employment Program.

Following an abbreviated tour of the PA CareerLink, Senator Casey met the press and spent nearly an hour with representatives of other Lancaster County organizations that received ARRA funding.

Published on The New Republic (http://www.tnr.com) on February 2, 2010: From its opening pages, the Obama administration's FY2011 budget request adopts a stance that pervades this blog. Declares the document: "We need to recognize that competitive, high-performing regional economies are essential to a strong national economy." (See page 20 of the federal budget.)

In line with this recognition, the new budget unveils not one, but several proposals to support regional industry or innovation "clusters" through multiple federal departments. Clusters, as we have noted previously, are a fundamental fact of national economies, and a critical enhancer of regional economic performance. However, as we have also noted, the U.S. lags other nations in providing support to these "bottom-up," region-based systems of business development, innovation, and talent matching. And so the 2011 budget seeks to change that by applying cluster approaches across multiple segments of the federal delivery system--rather than anchoring it in a single agency.

Along these lines, the administration's new approach marks a welcome advance over last year's initial budget request. Last year, the administration seemed to regard "clusters" as a discrete single program to be implemented by only the Economic Development Administration (EDA)--and so took its lumps en route to obtaining only a small portion of its request. This year's budget, by contrast, treats regional industry networks as more of an operating paradigm for multiple activities, and as more a means to the important end of linking and aligning multiple federal interventions to maximize their impact in support of regional prosperity. (See page 22 of the federal budget.)

Rome:  This article explores the impact of the current economic downturn on investment in innovation. First, what is the impact of the recession on firms' innovation activities? Second, what will be the outcomes on the innovation capabilities across the European countries?

Using structural data from the European Innovation Scoreboard and results from the Innobarometer Survey, the authors show that the recession is having a huge impact on innovation investments across European countries. They also point out that the effects of the economic downturn are not the same across Europe, and that this depends on specific features of the national innovation structure and national policies. The paper concludes with a discussion of policy considerations.

For a downloadable copy of the report, click here.

New York:  This report, jointly published by Center for an Urban Future and the Community Service Society, finds that New York City faces a human capital crisis that could threaten the city's long-term economic competitiveness while relegating countless residents to low-wage jobs. It shows that an alarming number of New Yorkers now lack the skills and educational credentials to compete in today's economy and warns that the problem will only get worse in the years ahead. The report calls for a comprehensive campaign to develop the skills of New York's population.

For a downloadable copy of the report, click here.