Blog

Ken Poole was recently a featured keynote speaker at the Site Selectors Guild conference in Orlando, Florida.  The conference focused on the theme “What Next?  Our Economy in 2012.”  Ken presented on “Ranking State and Regional Business Climates:  Benchmarking for Progress or a Staged Beauty Contest?“

CREC’s Dean Frutiger, Lauren Gilchrist, and Ron Kelly recently travelled to Cincinnati, Ohio to attended a NIST-Manufacturing Extension Partnership Innovation Engineering Leadership Institute training course.  This three-day, accelerated course applies the system mindset and principles of Dr. W. Edwards Deming to innovation and growth.  Lead by Eureka Ranch‘s Doug Hall, the course instructs participants in how to increase speed and decrease risk when developing products, services, and internal processes.

Learn more about Innovation Engineering here.

Ken Poole and Mark White recently traveled to Chatham-Kent, Ontario to conduct a series of meetings with the Chatham-Kent Workforce Planning Board in order to finalize policy recommendations for the creation of a regional workforce development strategy.  These policy recommendations will build upon an analysis Canadian economic data and input from local stakeholders.  Leaders from across the community were brought together to develop consensus on key issues, develop strategies for managing these challenges, and to set immediate priorities.

CREC is pleased to announce the release of its updated State Economic Development Expenditures Database, which now includes FY11 state economic development expenditures data and FY12 approved economic development expenditures data.

The State Economic Development Expenditures Database is a compilation of data on all 50 states’ investments in economic development using a consistent categorization of expenses across states.  The data are directly extracted from states’ operating budget documents and do not include tax expenditures.  Observations from this latest release (excluding Federal funding sources) include:

• States invested approximately $8.9 billion in economic development activities in FY11.
• State legislatures approved about $7.7 billion for economic development expenditures for FY12, a 13% decrease from FY11.
• States invested the most money in workforce preparation and development among all economic development activities for both FY11 and FY12.  In FY11, 29% of state economic development expenditures were invested in workforce preparation and development, while 28% of economic development budgets are allocated to the same category for FY12.
• States increased their investments in business assistance by nearly $103 million since FY11, the biggest absolute increase among all economic development activities.

The State Economic Development Expenditures Database is free for C2ER Organizational Members and can be accessed in the C2ER member area at www.c2er.org.  Data are available by state, year, and program area.  Non-members can purchase a license for the Database for $495 annually.

For more information or to purchase the database, please contact Wen Sun.

A recent Associated Press article examines state incentive programs for job creation.  Over the past decade, despite doubling loans, grants, and tax credit programs to more than 2,000 (according to C2ER data), unemployment has persisted, and evaluation of successes and failures is minimal.  Learn more here.

C2ER’s green jobs research in Arizona showed Arizona-based businesses expected to see 8.6 percent growth in green jobs by year-end, far outpacing the projected statewide growth rate of 0.7 percent for jobs overall.  For this project, CREC staff managed the state of Arizona’s LMI Improvement Grant from the Employment and Training Administration, conducting a survey of 10,000 businesses across the state.  Access recent Phoenix Business Journal coverage here.

For more information on C2ER’s work on the green economy in Arizona, access Understanding the Green Economy in Arizona.

The Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness (CREC) is pleased to announce the release of its analysis of the U.S. manufacturing sector for the first half of 2011 using real-time labor market information (LMI) data.  This assessment of web-based job advertisements, co-authored by Lauren Gilchrist, Ken Poole, and Mark White, examines the characteristics of anticipated manufacturing hiring during the first half of 2011.  Manufacturers sought workers for a variety of opportunities:

• Nine percent of web-advertised job openings in manufacturing during the first six months of 2011 were production-related.  These openings accounted for just over 60,000 of the manufacturing sector’s nearly 669,000 job openings advertised online between January and June 2011.
• Manufacturing job openings were concentrated in major metropolitan areas along the Atlantic seaboard, among Midwestern states, and in Texas and California.
• Almost one in four manufacturing job openings was in just three industries—computer and peripheral equipment manufacturing, aerospace product and parts manufacturing, and pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing.
• During the first half of 2011, manufacturing openings were concentrated in sales and management positions, engineering positions, and production occupations requiring significant prior work experience.
• Over half of the openings during the period required more than a high school diploma, and one out of every four production-related jobs required educational attainment beyond a high school diploma.
• Only seven percent of available manufacturing jobs identified a specific certification requirement.  Where certifications were required for manufacturing jobs, many related to lean manufacturing.

Access the full report: U.S. Manufacturing Jobs:  Where Companies Are Hiring

Ken Poole and Mark White recently completed the first round of training that CREC will conduct for the Economic Developers Council of Ontario (EDCO) in Thunder Bay and Sudbury, Ontario.  The training provides economic development practitioners with the knowledge and tools necessary to build a data-driven strategic growth plan for their community or region.  Through classroom discussion and case studies, these hands-on, interactive sessions demonstrated strategies for regional collaboration in response to current economic challenges and opportunities.

The next round of training for EDCO will be held mid-November in Kingston and Thamesford (London), Ontario.

Learn more and access the training agenda here.

The Windsor Star, a local newspaper in Windsor-Essex, Canada, recently highlighted CREC’s work for the Economic Developers Council of Ontario (EDCO).  CREC is creating a customized, two-tiered curriculum for EDCO that builds a case for collaborative regional planning and depicts clear steps for effectively approaching planning.  This curriculum is supplemented by case examples modeling how real-life planning has already been approached – to success and to failure – in Canada.

Access the article here.  Learn more about CREC’s work with EDCO here.

CREC CEO Ken Poole recently attended the kick-off event for Plan East Tennessee (PlanET) in Knoxville, TN.  Led by the Knoxville-Knox County Metropolitan Planning Commission, PlanET is a 36-month regional planning process aimed at developing capacity to improve the quality of life for residents in the Knoxville region.  CREC will assist PlanET in creating and implementing an ambitious multi-jurisdictional plan that will integrate economic development, environment, infrastructure, and public health considerations into a comprehensive plan to address area needs.

Learn more about PlanET here.