Moving toward open source approaches in Northeast Ohio

In Northeast Ohio, a group of foundations, The Fund for Our Economic Future has taken important steps toward an "open source" approach to its work, and the early results are inspiring. Over the weekend, the local paper supported the Fund's new initiative to  stimulate collaboration among local governments. Read more.

No doubt, this step is small: the $300,000 proposed for this initiative represents only about 3-4% of the Fund's total investment each year in regional economic development.

Yet, for a region noted for its tight corporate control over economic development agendas, the Fund's new experiment is a hopeful sign. It may open the door to a move away from the Fund's past practices of investing in a handful of top-heavy regional organizations.

If a region's efforts are too tightly controlled by its leaders, the region risks becoming closed to innovation. They give rise to the type of "industrial policies" set by a handful of people who, ultimately, are detached from quickly changing market signals.

The Fund can use its experiment in government collaboration to find and fund other collaborations beyond government.

We have followed a similar path with our Opportunity Fund in Indiana: We've invested about $5 million over the past couple of years in 14 counties surrounding Purdue. Here's what we have learned.

1. Inspire trust with transparent standards for evaluating proposals.

2. Focus on replicability and scalability.

3. Create a "stage-gate" approach to progressively fund ideas and nurture them as they develop.

4. Set clear, flexible accountability rules to minimize administrative costs.

Here are examples of the innovations that have "popped up":

An inspiring guitar summer camp to demonstrate manufacturing skills to high schoolers. Mark French, the Purdue professor who came up with the idea, is now moving the initiative statewide. Watch a video that inspired applause when I showed it to the Governor's Workforce Summit in Idaho.

A "green collar certification" for manufacturing employees. Purdue is working with the Society for Mechanical Engineers to roll this certification out nationally this fall. The idea popped up when Christy Bozic, a Purdue employee, threw it out among 14 people in our Strategic Doing session in the basement of the White County courthouse. Humble beginnings for a major idea, to be sure. Read more.

A healthy workforce initiative that extends the benefits of wellness programs to smaller manufacturers. This program was so good, Purdue decided to adopt it. Allison Bryan, another Purdue employee, came up with this idea. Read more. The idea is now forming a core for the expanding alliance between Purdue and Indiana University. Read more.

A new initiative, announced last week, to engage engineers recently laid off from Delphi Electronics. Kalamazoo's work with scientists displaced by the Pfizer shutdown inspired our work. Jan Hendrix, an economic development professional in Kokomo, came up with this idea. Read more.

We are currently funding over 50 of these initiatives in four strategic focus areas. We are doing it all with 1 administrator. That's the power of Open Source Economic Development. SE Wisconsin -- the Milwaukee 7 region -- is following this open source model of "Strategic Doing". One of their most powerful initiatives to come from their version of an Opportunity Fund: a new fresh water technology cluster. Here's more background from an earlier BFD post. These Open Source approaches are catching on.

Idaho and Colorado are using them to redesign their workforce systems.

The U.S. Department of Labor is using them to help manage the flood of re-employment demands arising from this downturn.

The Center for Education Innovation and Regional Economic Development, a collaborative of 40 school districts in SE WIsconsin, is using this approach to develop transformative collaborations among their members.

Purdue and the Economic Development Institute at the University of Oklahoma are launching a new certificate program in Open Source Economic Development this fall.

Open Source approaches combine open participation with leadership direction. They are fast, practical and transformative. But they work for an entirely different reason: People find meaning and they have fun collaborating.