As published in the July 1, 2006 Toledo Business Journal
Dr. Michael Carroll
Bowling Green State University,
director, center for regional development
Clusters key to economic growth in the region
Toledo Business Journal recently interviewed Dr. Michael Carroll, an economist and director of the center for regional development at Bowling Green State University. He shared the following thoughts.
TBJ: You recently hosted a gathering of community leaders called the State of the Region Conference. Can you share thoughts that surfaced in this session concerning economic development opportunities for our area involving regional collaboration?
MC: One of the common themes that surfaced was: How do we move forward as a team? Michael Gallis had a sports metaphor, about how you have to have a strong center, which would be the center city, then you have to have equal strength in the surrounding regions, but everyone has to work as a team.
The way we set the conference up was to have Gallis lay the foundation, talking about the need for regionalism, and then we had two success stories. Kip Bergstrom, the executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Policy Council, talked about how Providence is now linking into the Boston metro region for more opportunities for development. Russell Gwatney, a director and past president of the Memphis Regional Chamber, discussed how his organization had Michael Gallis come in to help create a plan. Memphis was able to capitalize on its fairly small medical cluster and – by combining that with the FedEx facility – they were really able to put something together. Now they’re the leading transplant package facilitators in the country.
Part of our mission with the State of the Region Conference was to get the public dialogue started in the correct direction. What needs to happen now is we need to get the local economic development practitioners thinking regionally. Universities don’t do economic development, per se. We can only provide the support and keep the correct topics on people’s minds.
TBJ: Can you discuss specific actions that area leaders could take for increasing regional collaboration to assist job growth?
MC: More face-to-face contact with the area leadership not their staff. By leadership, I mean private sector people at the CEO level, elected officials, and the presidents of the development agencies. I think if you could get some sort of real dialogue going on between economic development practitioners – I know we have NORED that is a collection of economic development agencies, but you need something more than that. You need actual face-to-face contacts where the people in power develop a plan then literally assign the next step to someone, because what we often have now are conferences where we say this is something we need to do, but then it’s never really assigned to someone.
TBJ: You have led activities – along with Dr. Neil Reid at The University of Toledo – in the area of economic clusters for our region. Can you provide an update of where this effort stands?
MC: We have a unified plan – we know what we’re doing when it comes to the idea of cluster-based development. The greenhouse project that’s going on now is doing it the way it should be done.
We’ve identified the clusters; there are eight of them. We were looking for the Regional Growth Partnership (RGP) and some of the other agencies to take over, say, the auto and the plastics clusters. During their reorganization that hasn’t occurred. Neil and I decided that we’re just going to go ahead and do the greenhouse cluster because we had the funding from the Department of Agriculture.
We hired the cluster champion, an extension agent from Michigan State. He’s working 20 hours a week down here and 20 hours a week at his regular position. We’ve got some joint marketing going on with Maumee Valley Growers – that’s the name that this concept has taken on. We hired Thread out of Maumee to do the advertising. We test marketed the name and taglines – we’ve done it right.
We have an advisory board that meets monthly to get all of the growers together. We’re asking them what sort of problems they can’t solve on their own and then maybe we can apply some other resources for that. And it’s working. Our attendance at the meetings is growing. We used to have around five to ten people show up, now we’re upwards of 35 out of a population of 82 growers, so we’ve gotten a lot of people engaged in this.
TBJ: Can you discuss the next steps in the greenhouse cluster?
MC: We’ll continue on with the branding; make sure that everybody understands that the cluster project is the Maumee Valley Growers. We’re going to try to increase our participation from the growers. The concrete steps for this next year will be looking at possible group purchasing of energy, whether it’s natural gas or propane, as well as group purchasing of insurance. The overall goal of this is for these firms to make more money.
TBJ: Realizing that each cluster is different, can you provide a general discussion of the resources that will be required to properly support economic development in any one cluster?
MC: The model that we have chosen is the model that has been successful in Europe. Generally, you would fund one project manager, who would interface with people like Neil and myself, because we just wouldn’t have the time given our teaching and other responsibilities. That would be the one go-to person that if you needed something done, you call the project manager.
Then you have the champion in the field. The champion is someone who comes from that industry, who has a lot of respect from the other members of that industry. That’s probably the key; you can’t just drop someone in and think that people are going to work with them. That could be someone from an economic development agency. For example, the champions could be housed or on staff at an economic development agency. It wouldn’t be an additional cost. It would be more of a focusing on some key strategies and strengths.
TBJ: Other than the human resources side, are there other funds that may be needed?
MC: There are, because you still would have to brand that particular project. That’s key. We’re spending about $80,000 this year on marketing for the greenhouse, but that also includes some of the work that Thread did up front. It was a difficult thing that we asked Thread to do: we asked them to brand the greenhouse cluster, but also brand it as an economic development tool so when we do get other clusters up and running then we’d have a common look and theme. Where the real synergies are going to come from is when two or three of the cluster champions – once they’re all up and running – start talking to each other. So you have the champion in the transportation sector talking to the greenhouse champion, and there may be something completely new – you never know what would actually occur – but that’s where the real synergies would occur.
TBJ: Are there any other issues you would like to address?
MC: Decline will be much faster than growth, so we need to do something now. What we have now is not working.
I think the clusters are moving forward. The transportation cluster is being championed by the Port Authority. I think that’s probably the second most developed cluster. As far as the third, originally I would say that it is the information technology cluster. Nadine Johnson of RGP was working hard on that a year or year and a half ago. I think that one has some real potential because Bill McCreary from Pilkington was the industry person behind that, and he was very supportive… It was really starting to take some shape and then the reorganization of RGP came along, and it’s kind of been moved to the back burner. But I think that one has some real potential.