We have been using emsi labor market datasets and the ‘emsi Analyst’ tool to generate regional economic reports for our regional partners. We will be generating a set of five reports as a part of the KOIN initiative. The aim of these reports is to give our regional partners an overview of the region and aid them in decision making.
Part I of the Regional Economic Report provided an overview of the region. The report includes regional demographics, GRP, import/exports, jobs, employers, growing/declining occupations and industries, earnings, regional knowledge and skills. Part II of the report describes in more detail the region’s Industry, including major industrial clusters, shift share, jobs and wages. Part III will describe the regional occupations in more details including data about jobs, education and wages. Part IV of the report will describe in detail the educational programs in the region including regional completions, openings, jobs and median wage. The final report will be a summarization of all the parts and additional information and/or case studies.
This is the fourth of the series of the five report for the North Central Kansas region.
Regional Education Assets Report
We have been using emsi labor market datasets and the ‘emsi Analyst’ tool to generate regional economic reports for our regional partners. We will be generating a set of five reports as a part of the KOIN initiative. The aim of these reports is to give our regional partners an overview of the region and aid them in decision making.
Part I of the Regional Economic Report provided an overview of the region. The report includes regional demographics, GRP, import/exports, jobs, employers, growing/declining occupations and industries, earnings, regional knowledge and skills. Part II of the report describes in more detail the region’s Industry, including major industrial clusters, shift share, jobs and wages. Part III will describe the regional occupations in more details including data about jobs, education and wages. Part IV of the report will describe in detail the educational programs in the region including regional completions, openings, jobs and median wage. The final report will be a summarization of all the parts and additional information and/or case studies.
This is the third of the series of the five report for the North Central Kansas region.
Regional Occupation Assets Report
In an article (paywall) in Crain’s Cleveland Business, Harry Moser from the Reshoring Initiative discusses what what one company’s surprising reshoring success experience indicates for others in the manufacturing industry. Rising labor costs in China and higher energy costs are causing many to reconsider their sourcing decisions. With the advantages of shorter supply chains, minimizing disruption, and the benefits design and engineering being proximate to the manufacturing process, many companies are choosing to manufacture their products in the U.S.
Moser states “There’s nothing much simpler to make than a Frisbee and there’s no place in the U.S. more expensive than California or Michigan, so if you can bring Frisbees back from China to California and Michigan, you can bring anything back to Kansas.”
Also, discussed in the article is the multiplier effect that reshored jobs can have. Because manufacturing firms are ubiquitous in the supply chain, a company that makes the decision to reshore can set off a chain reaction to add jobs at shops both up- and down-stream in the production process.
head over to http://www.policymap.com/maps it is pretty nice
Today we learned that Project 17 (A community led project in 17 counties in southeast Kansas) is going to be supported by a USDA and EDA sponsored program. We are really happy to be part of this program and it’s great to see federal programs working together to support local initiatives. Here is the proposal as well as the official press release:
Project 17 Wins Rural Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge
Funding To Promote Innovation and Economic Opportunities in Southeast Kansas
August 1, 2012 – The Rural Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge winners were announced today to help spur job creation and economic growth in rural regions across the country.
Project 17 was one of 13 national awardees to receive a Rural Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge grant and will receive $715,000 to help revitalize Southeast Kansas to promote economic opportunities.
The Rural Jobs Accelerator Challenge is a national initiative to support rural partnerships that are critical to support small businesses. By leveraging local assets, the selected industry clusters and partnerships can do even more to help entrepreneurs and small businesses foster innovation, increase competitiveness and employ highly skilled workers, all of which are critical to long-term economic growth in their regions.
Project 17 will receive a $215,000 grant from USDA Rural Development and a $500,000 grant from the Economic Development Administration (EDA) to help promote job creation, accelerate innovation and provide assistance to entrepreneurs and businesses.
“USDA Rural Development is pleased to provide financial support, in concert with EDA, to this locally-led, regional planning effort. The state and local support help capture the federal funds to finance this multi-county, multi-community collaboration,” said USDA Rural Development State Director Patty Clark.
“Regional planning will help create more opportunities for the skilled workforce, a higher quality of life for residents and a brighter future for the individuals and families that choose to call Southeast Kansas home.”
The three-year project will create a shared regional vision and an asset-based development approach to spur job and wealth creation through the development of the Southeast Kansas Opportunity Innovation Network. The network will assist with mapping regional assets, profiling the innovation capabilities of businesses, and connecting businesses with innovation resources.
“Through comments from 300 Southeast Kansans, Project 17 has identified four areas that need to be addressed: Economic Development, Healthcare, Leadership and Permanent Structure,” stated Yvonne Hull, Executive Director of the Coffeyville Area Chamber of Commerce. “This grant will provide Project 17 with the resources necessary to open up growth opportunities for businesses in Southeast Kansas.”
Seventeen Southeast Kansas Counties will be served through the project: Allen, Anderson, Bourbon, Chautauqua, Cherokee, Coffey, Crawford, Elk, Franklin, Greenwood, Labette, Linn, Miami, Montgomery, Neosho, Wilson, and Woodson.
The goal of the project is to create and sustain well-paid jobs in identified industry clusters in the Southeast Kansas region by leveraging experience and methods of recognized regional development experts, and engaging economic and community leaders from across the region.
This competition, which is being funded by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Appalachian Regional Commission, and Delta Regional Authority, was designed by the Taskforce for the Advancement of Regional Innovation Clusters and the White House Rural Council. The initiative is also supported by nine other Federal agencies: Commerce’s U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and National Institute of Standards and Technology Manufacturing Extension Partnership; Denali Commission; U.S. Department of Education; U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration; U.S. Department of Energy; Environmental Protection Agency; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; and the Small Business Administration.
USDA announced there were 62 applicants nationally for Rural Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge grant funding, and 13 projects were picked.
Additional Rural Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge winners include:
- Alaska: Bristol Bay Jobs Accelerator Project, $405,023
- Connecticut: New England Food Hub Cluster Initiative, $568,150
- Illinois: Henry-Rural Rock Island-Mercer County Economic Development Consortium, $193,500
- Louisiana-Arkansas: I-20 Corridor Regional Accelerator, $964,134
- Mississippi: Mississippi State University, $1,065,000
- New Hampshire: Northern Tier Farm and Forest Jobs Accelerator, $708,750
- North Carolina: WNC AgriVentures – Cultivating Jobs and Innovation Project, $815,000
- North Carolina: Northern Carolina Eastern Region Aerospace and Automotive Cluster Project, $715,000
- South Carolina: Southern Carolina Alliance Rural Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge, $650,000
- Virginia: Appalachian Spring – Using Asset-Based and Creative Economy Methods to Catalyze Rural Job Acceleration, $815,000
- West Virginia: Southern West Virginia Rural Jobs Accelerator Partnership, $717,985
- West Virginia: Value Chain Cluster Initiative, $815,000
For more information about the Rural Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge contact Yvonne Hull, Coffeyville Area Chamber of Commerce, 620-251-2550.
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A Cluster Grows in Chicago.
There’s been a run of good news for Chicago recently which, apart from giving Mayor Rahm Emanuel some happy headlines, tell us something about the nature of global cities, about the shape of this new economy, and about who wins and who loses.
Richard C. Longworth on his The Midwesterner blog posted about the recent good news about business attraction in downtown Chicago. It’s interesting that these moves are not tied to specific traditional attraction efforts (TIFs and the like) but rather the draw of a dynamic cluster. As we have pointed out before rural areas have an ambivalent relationship with cluster type development. Practically and by definition most rural areas can’t expect to support a cluster on its own. Furthermore there are real questions about the downward scalability of cluster development. Rather rural areas must pay attention to the adjacent clusters, adjacent in location but also adjacent by capabilities and travel.
So cheer for the cities and watch for the opportunities.
Here’s the question… Are the regional organizations, i.e. EDA regions, Tourism, EMS and the like, pulling our counties together into cohesive groups, weaving the counties into interrelated groups or pulling the local leaders apart as they respond to the needs of different regions with different characteristics?
Below is a graph of the counties and some of the different regional groups they are connected to. The visualization uses an experimental tool from Google called Fusion Tables (you may notice some strange actions).
The orange dots represent different regional organizations and the blue dots are the counties of Kansas. As you can see there are a few clusters of counties that have similar allegiances and they get pulled together into large masses in the view. Other counties, for instance Morris or Marion, are relatively isolated and pulled between many groups. You can use your mouse to hover over the county or group to highlight the direct connection. What might this mean to the local leaders in the region? How might this effect how services are provided?
There are potential advantages of either tightly clustered groups of counties that know how to work together or highly interwoven network that provide opportunities to share knowledge. We present the visualization to spur conversation about the composition of regional groups.
New article from the Harvard Business Review acknowledges that manufacturing might actually be important for innovation. There is a great deal of what might be hype around re-shoring and the revitalization of manufacturing. While bringing back factories is great, the real boon comes in the chance to relink the engineers, designers, and management to the actual means of production. I have written about the tacit knowledge that must be developed between production and consumption (Bandwidth, Redundancy and Fidelity in Supplychain Communications), there is just as important case to be made for that communication between development and production. And that case it made better than I can in this article from HBR.org
via Just How Important Is Manufacturing?.
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