Crossing the Next Regional Frontier: Information and Analytics Linking Regional Competitiveness...

"The purpose of this project is to make it easier for civic leaders and economic development practitioners to understand the dynamics of their regional economy. This project also outlines how leaders can come together to develop practical strategies for investment. This report builds upon an earlier project…with the same purpose: to help leaders and practitioners understand their economy and develop strategies to strengthen it.The decision support tools created in the prior project focused on industry clusters. Specifically, industry cluster data were compiled and made available in a user-friendly format for each county in the United States…In this project, we have developed three additional tools, along with a practitioner’s guide, for local leaders and economic development practitioners:

1. The construction of occupational and skill clusters and associated data for each county in the nation. This is an analogue to the more commonly used industry clusters constructs and data that were emphasized in the earlier project.

2. An index of innovation for each county in the United States.

3. A framework and tool to enable economic development practitioners, local government officials, and other stakeholders to prioritize key public investments and ensure these investments are aligned, or consistent with, the local/regional economic development strategy" (p.18). (Abstractor: Author)

Full publication title: Crossing the Next Regional Frontier: Information and Analytics Linking Regional Competitiveness to Investment in a Knowledge-Based Economy

"Overall, there are 100 counties (out of 3,111 counties) that have high output results..in both economic well-being and productivity and employment. Of those counties, only 40 also have high inputs...in human capital and economic dynamics. These 40 counties are, in essence, the innovation leaders where high inputs are linked to high outputs. For the remaining 60 counties with high outputs, 31 have high levels of inputs in at least one category, as well as relatively high levels in the other...The remaining 29 counties are more challenging to interpret as their outputs are high but neither input component is high. For these counties, their high output levels could be related to other input factors not included in the index (e.g. natural resource extraction). Conversely, the counties with high levels of inputs but marginal outputs may signify a delayed or lagged effect in realizing the economic benefits from improved human capital and economic dynamism. Testing such a relationship was beyond the scope of this study, but the notion merits further research" (p.88) (Abstractor: Author)

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2009
• Author(s): No individual authors identified
• Organizational Author(s): PCRD-Purdue Univ.; Indiana Business Research Center-Indiana Univ.; RUPRI-Univ. of Missouri, Et al.
• Funding Source: U.S. Department of Commerce
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Melissa Mack
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies