On behalf of I-Open, we would like to invite you to attend our upcoming I-Open Retreat at Punderson Resort and Conference Center on December 3, 4 and 5.  Please go to our link  below for detailed information and registration information.  The URL is:
http://i-open-education.near-time.net/wiki/i-open-leadership-retreat-at-punderson-resort-and-conference-center-december-3-4-and-5-2008. 

After you have had a chance to review the material, we hope you will consider attending.  Ed Morrison, who is a gifted speaker and strategist will lead the workshop. This is Ed's premier Open Source Economic Development Workshop targeting workforce development professionals, economic development practitioners, academic, business and government leaders across the country, focusing on community and regional economies.  Ed is a great teacher and leader; everyone who attends this workshop comes away with at least one principal and/or practice that he or she can utilize in their work.

If you cannot attend, perhaps you can recommend someone else you think would benefit from this 2-day program. 

If you have any questions, please contact Susan Altshuler at susanaltshuler@gmail.com or 216-577-9957.

We hope to see you at the workshop - please register soon as space is limited.

The I-Open Team: 

Susan Altshuler

Betsey Merkel

Gloria Ferris

Dennis Coughlin

Ed Morrison

Read the post on Innovating Networks by Stacy Wagner about creative thinking and innovation in America's future employees - integrated arts education. Click here to read more.

Also be sure to take a couple of minutes and watch Sir Ken Robinson's video when he presented at TED.  Ed Morrison said that the presentatioln is one of the most inspiring he has seen. And it is hilalrous. Watch video here

From Chris Gibbons - Economic Gardening who led the workshop at the Lowe Foundation on August 16, 17 and 18th.  Ed Morrison attended the workshop

About 30 of us spent the weekend at the Edward Lowe Foundation in
southern Michigan going through training in Economic Gardening.  It was
a good group with lots of expertise in a number of areas.  Even though
we worked intensely (from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Sunday), we still could
not cover all the aspects of EG.  We did accomplish the primary
objective of getting folks exposed to all elements including the history
and philosophy of the approach, the major tools, the major concepts as
well as some opportunities to apply them to case studies.  

The ELF staff is superior...everyone from the grounds keepers to the
food service folks to Dino and Shannon who helped with exercises and
kept a close watch on the state of the group.  We had people from major
urban areas (Orlando, Baltimore, Atlanta), people from rural areas and
representatives of university and regional organizations in including
state operations.

The weather was gorgeous the entire weekend and even our hikes in the
woods and contemplation times at the ponds were with minimal bugs and
humidity (important to my Colorado soul  :-)  )   I returned home to
snow on the mountains ....summer is brief in the high country.  This
year we had snow the day before our conference in Steamboat (second week
of June) and now again in mid-August.

To learn more about Economic Gardening go here .

Everyone showed up.

It wasn't a ribbon cutting ceremony; it wasn't a ground breaking. It was all about throwing a switch.

Rock Port, MO, became America's first ever community to be completely powered by wind in April 2008. Rock Port has a population of 1,316, with 715 or so households. Four Suzlon 1.25-MW turbines deliver 5 MW of electricity into the grid that serves the community. It takes winds of up to 9-miles per hour to get the blades of the turbines spinning.

This week's top picks from Fabio Sabatini's Social Capital Gateway Newsletter:

1. Culture, Creativity and Innovation in the Internet Age

   Date:	2008-05-23
   By:	Freeman, Alan
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:9007&r=soc
   bstract This unpublished paper was submitted to the May 22-23 conference on IPR at Birkbeck College, London. It analyses the distinct economic roles of culture, creation, and innovation in the Creative Industries by assessing the fitness for purpose of their statistical definitions. On this basis it proposes a method for studying the relation between creative labour and innovation. Lax usage has made the term ‘Creative Industries’ a synonym for three distinct things: creativity, culture and intellectual alienability. I use the term Cultural and Creative Sector (CCS). My aim is to distinguish Creative Labour, of which the sector is a specialist user, from Cultural Outputs, which the sector produces. These are found combined in the CCS in an advanced form, but they also exist separately outside it. In order to understand their wider economic impact – in particular, their relation to innovation and Intellectual Property – it is necessary to distinguish them. I begin from the empirical reality of the Creative Industries as currently defined which, I argue, establishes it as an ‘industrial sector’, in the economically meaningful sense that it is a specialised branch of the division of labour. Its definition, however, has yet to be aligned with this reality. This sector’s specialism is that it employs creative labour to produce cultural products. Its emergence is the outcome of two processes: a separation of mechanical from creative labour, which we inherit from the age of machines, and a revolution in service sector productivity, arising from the age of the internet. Creative labour is a general economic resource, employed both inside and outside the CCS. The CCS is the starting point of an adequate definition, because in it, creative labour is found in its most advanced and specialised form, and because in it, this kind of labour has applied to maximum effect the new service technologies which have emerged with the internet age. However, in order properly to assess its wider impact, creative labour has to be defined independent of the assumption that it only produces cultural products. This paper proposes such a definition. It outlines, on the basis of this definition, how the economic contribution of creative labour to service sector growth might be assessed.
   Keywords:	cultural economics; creative industries; innovation; internet
   JEL:	Z1 O3 J2

2. Enabling and Sustaining Collaborative Innovation

   Date:	2008
   By:	Blecker, Thorsten Abdelkafi, Nizar Raasch, Christina
   URL:	http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:8964&r=soc
   This paper extends the principles of open source software development to a non-industry-specific level by introducing the Open Source Innovation (OSI) model. OSI exhibits main differences to other related models and concepts such as the private-collective model, commons-based peer production, R&D networks and is therefore an innovation model in its own right. In order for OSI projects to be successful, numerous factors need to be fulfilled. We make the distinction between four categories of factors: economic, technical, legal, and social. In each category, we differentiate between enabling and sustaining factors. The enabling factors must be met at the beginning of the project, whereas the sustaining factors must be satisfied as the project progresses.
   Keywords:	OSI; open source innovation; R&D
   JEL:	O32 L17 O3 O31

Here's a press release on Ed Morrison's recent presentation in Illinois:

..." Sunday, May 18, 2008 10:59 PM CDT
Regional networking key to future economy, ECIDC speaker says

By BILL LAIR, Managing Editor
blair@jg-tc.com

The challenge for civic leaders today is figuring out how to forecast the future workplace needs of the country.

Ed Morrison, an economic policy adviser for the Purdue center for Regional Development, said people spend too much energy placing blame on economic problems instead of planning for improvements.

Morrison was the featured speaker at the nine-county East Central Illinois Development Corporation’s Annual Dinner and BESI Awards on Thursday in Effingham.

The BESI awards went to Jim Ryan of Marshall, John Inyart of Charleston and to the Journal Gazette/Times-Courier for their achievements in business ethics and social involvement.

From the Economic Development Association of New Zealand

Economic development occurs at a national, regional and local level, but this is not a hierarchy. Each level is just as important as the others and the inter-relationships can be quite complex.

Local government has long made a direct and significant contribution to economic development at the regional and local level. Research by the Economic Development Association of New Zealand in 2007 showed that local and regional councils were committing about $40 million a year to economic development. This level of investment from local government includes salaries and project funds but excludes big spending on capital works, infrastructure provision and tourism.

The activities at a regional and local level are nested within a much broader context. There is basic agreement that our overarching goal is to increase New Zealand's prosperity. For many years, we have been slipping behind the other countries we tend to compare ourselves with. We want to catch up by growing faster than our trading partners.

It's a big ask. Even as we look to accelerate development, all the other countries will be doing exactly the same thing. This is the national context for economic development. The refreshed economic transformation agenda has five themes: growing globally competitive firms; innovative and productive workplaces; environmental sustainability; Auckland as a global city; world-class infrastructure.

Regional and local economic development takes place within that global and national context. Each level of economic development has set clear priorities. There is a critical expectation that the national context has been properly informed by local and regional needs. Some regional and local priorities link to national priorities but here's the rub – they all have their own regional flavour. Some regions may be working on the same national priority but likely to be doing so in very different ways. There is no one- size-fits-all solution nor should there be.

Additionally, each region will differ in the ordering of their priorities. The exercise of linking all these priorities is useful because it signals where national, regional and local priorities intersect. In turn, that makes it clear which priorities central, regional and local government can work together on in terms of actually implementing a solution.

Clearly, not all regional and local priorities will link to national ones. There is a place for regional and local priorities which are just that – regional and local solutions using regional and local resources. There are existing structures which can be used to develop these linkages, bring all the respective strategies together and to act as a useful conduit for coordinated action and implementation plans. If we can make this system work better, it will contribute greatly to development and growth.

Economic development is much more than just the various projects and programmes that play out at various levels around the country. Fundamentally, it is about the conversations with businesses about their needs and how that information then filters back up to shape policy.

Take the example of skill shortages. If the tertiary education system is to solve future skill needs, it will require focused talks with businesses about what those skill needs are going to be in, say, five years. If those talks do not happen, education and training become decoupled from business need. No one wins.

More broadly, we need to build connectivity within the innovation system. This involves creating meaningful, continuing links between business, research and educational institutions, which must be based on high trust levels, and all parties need to see the value in the process.

Local and regional councils can work with central government agencies to establish robust and action-oriented strategies and action plans. They can engage with business communities to ensure all those strategies and action plans are properly informed by the needs of those who are actually creating the wealth and jobs.

Only then can we begin to catch up.

* Bevan Graham is chief executive at the Economic Development Association of New Zealand (EDANZ).

How can NEO learn from this model of engagement, leadership, learning, and quality of intentions?

Ireland will host the next PENR3L/PASCAL 2008 Conference at the University of Limerick, May 28 - 30. The host partners are:

"PENR3L (PASCAL European Network of Regions of Lifelong Learning) is a programme designed to establish a dynamic and growing working network of expertise centres and forward-looking local and regional authorities that will work together to accelerate the growth throughout Europe of learning cities and regions, ready to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

"PASCAL is an international research and policy development alliance, which aims to develop, communicate and explain new and emerging ideas about place management, social capital and learning regions. PASCAL was initiated by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, the University of Stirling, the Victoria Government, the Scottish Executive and Kent County Council. The Univesity of Limerick and the University of Glasgow together with the founding members have organised this international conference.

The conference goals are described here:

"The key focus will not be on regional development or the development of the learning region per se but rather the impact these have in terms of regional regeneration and development that has flowed from the efforts to develop learning regions.

Here's what they looking ahead to accomplish:

• "The role of the Learning Region in developing regional Lifelong Learning strategies
• Learning how to create constructive partnerships at local, regional, national and international level
• Demonstrating the value of policy makers and practitioners from public, private and NGOs working with academic institutions
• Facing the challenges of changing demographics
• Disseminating applied research findings to end users
• Demonstrating engagement with community networks for social change

Learn more about the conference and this model for learning and re-generation here.

On April 10, 2008 there will be a national call in roundtable with Ed Morrison of I-Open as one of two presenters. The roundtable will be seeking answers to: "Why, if innovation economics is such a great idea, has the adoption and use of this tool of economic development been so slow" and  "Does the traditional economic development model retard development of regional economic innovation?" Read more

A colleague of I-Open, Jeff Miller from Indiana sent me a link to a the Cognitive Edge website.  Even though they come from a consultancy and for profit standpoint, their focus and principles, parallels I-Open's principles and practices.  To read more about this company go here

Susan Altshuler

Ed Morrison, Policy Director of I-Open, advises The Department of Labor and WIRED regions (Workforce Innovations in Regional Economic Development) One of the WIRED grants went to M-7 in MIlwaukee Wisconsin.  The Milwaukee 7, the metro region's main economic-development agency, said it will solicit new and experimental ideas as it doles out $2.5 million in grants to train workers for 21st-century jobs.
The group will hold an innovation forum April 11 to hear proposals aimed at matching workers with employers.

The goal is to move beyond bureaucratic "risk-averse" job-training models and begin testing "risk-tolerant" ideas.

The Milwaukee Mayor took control of the Private Industry Council of Milwaukee County last year, echoing private-sector charges that the agency was ineffective. He created a new agency, called the Milwaukee Area Workforce Investment Board.
Read more