Competitive Communities build on three strategic elements: brainpower, quality place and innovation. When each supports the other a community economy is sustainable. A quality place is the means to attract smart people. Brainpower is a source of ideas and potential for the future. These two elements are the foundation of the trilogy. Innovation capitalizes on brainpower and grows in the proper physical environment / quality place. Innovation is the realm of the entrepreneur.

Does your region have an entrepreneurial culture? Research institutions, quality K-12 education and a high amenity environment are important. However, to achieve innovation benefits of entrepreneurs require thoughtful planning and managing of relationships between brainpower, quality place and innovation. The key is open effective dialogue.

The National Commission on Entrepreneurship (NCOE) goal is to provide a road map for more regions across the country to become “hotbeds of entrepreneurial activity.” To better understand why some communities have succeeded NCOE conducted 18 focus groups across the U.S. with over 250 entrepreneurs. The results of this dialogue were published in a July 2000 report, “Building Companies, Building Communities: Entrepreneurs in the New Economy”. This work provides some basic insights into important connections between the three strategic elements of Competitive Communities. Here are a few excerpts from the report:

“When you visit an entrepreneurial hotbed in the U.S., it is clear that “something is in the air.” But what is that something? Entrepreneurial companies are not equally distributed around the country: they tend to cluster in certain regions or cities. The causes of this phenomenon cannot be tied solely to the personal attributes of entrepreneurs. Can it be that people in Silicon Valley and Austin are the only ones with good ideas? Not likely. Some deeper processes are at work. The NCOE … analyzed the factors that entrepreneurial regions have in common … what policies are needed to help create more entrepreneurs and to ensure that more entrepreneurs succeed.

One or two entrepreneurs can shine in any community, but one or two entrepreneurs do not make an entrepreneurial community. To have a strong entrepreneurial community, lots of threads must be woven together: public policy that supports entrepreneurship, people, money, technology, customers, transportation, a supportive environment, and services, to name just a few. As more threads are woven together, the community’s strength and resource base grows.

… The secret of an entrepreneurial community is how regional development strategies and networks work together. While there are many strong entrepreneurial regions in this country, entrepreneurs are not sprinkled evenly across the landscape. Our focus group participants clearly understood that their regions grew according to a pattern. The presence of a university or anchor company served as a spark, and, as the region grew, more entrepreneurs—as well as entrepreneur support systems—emerged and prospered. The biggest challenge today is to find ways to give more regions the option to pursue this path to development.”

Understanding and defining knowledge worker lifestyles is an important economic development tactic for the future. Benefits from this segment of the economy are too attractive to ignore. Higher income per capita and increased levels of entrepreneurial activity are among benchmarks used to rank these innovation economies. If you don’t have a strategy for your region, get one. Many communities continue to focus shrinking resources on business recruitment, while watching real per capita income and entrepreneurial activity trend down and the quality of place / uniqueness value follow. These traits are characteristic of a “Consolidation Model” on our Quality Place Scales. Consolidation communities see a proliferation of big boxes, logistics and large-scale manufacturing.

Redirecting public investments from recruiting business to recruiting and retaining creative people is often a hard sell to decision makers. Changing moves communities to a “Competitive Model” on our scales. These places are knowledge based, small scale and entrepreneurial. Place strategies are becoming integral parts of economic development plans for regions building a knowledge economy.

The following is from a 60-page plan released last week, “The Essential New York Initiative – Transforming Central Upstate to a Knowledge-Based Economy”,by the Metropolitan Development Association with consultants Richard Florida and the Battelle Memorial Institute:

“Quality of Place is Increasingly Important - To attract and retain creative people, stimulate innovation and generate regional economic growth, a region must maintain substantial but balanced performance across a wide range of factors. Technology, business attraction and talent are major components of any economic development plan, but they are not enough. A holistic plan must also consider the factors that impact talent attraction. As discussed, well-educated, creative workers make location decisions based on factors beyond employment opportunity. A region’s quality of place, its reputation for tolerance and its cultural diversity play important roles in attracting and retaining members of the creative class.

These talented individuals consider a wide-range of lifestyle amenities in their location decisions. Big-ticket attractions such as stadiums do not appear to be major factors in attracting talented people and high-tech industries. Features such as a vibrant street life, easily accessible outdoor recreation and a cutting-edge music scene appear to be much more compelling in luring the nation’s most creative and educated workers.”