We had a great time in New Orleans with Workforce Innovations. About 200+ representaitives from WIRED regions attended the conference. Most of the content will be up on the Workforce Innovations site soon.

In the meantime, check out Innovating Networks for a bunch of content related to the conference.

Here are my takeaways at from the conference:

• Workforce3One is a powerful repository of digital content. On the second day of Workforce Innovations, ETA distributed a book "WOrkforce Solutions". We need to find more and better ways for people to interact and connect with this content. These are initiatives funded by the DOL and organized by sector:
  

• Advanced manufacturing
• Aerospace
• Auutomotive
• Biotechnology
• Construction
• Energy
• Financial Services
• Forestry
• Geospatial Technology
• Health Care
• Hospitality
• Information Technology
• Retail
• Transportation

• There's a good shot agt getting the WIRED reigons in the Great Lakes together on a regular basis. This is an excitiing prospect.
  
• James Vander Huist gave me perhaps the biggest ah-ha moment, when he suggested that we recruit young professionals and interns in each WIRED region to contirbute to WIRED Nation. James has agreed to help me follow up.
  
• We have a ways to go to get people comfortable with Web 2.0 tools, but we're making a good start with WIRED Nation and Innovating Networks. Hopefully, as the Federal government embraces these tools more completely, we'll see agencies providing federal workers with more flexibility to blog and act as "trusted guides" to the public workforce system. 
• The story of the Warren Featherbone Company is so interesting, and it's almost mythical. A compny staqrts out making featherbones for women's corsets. Plastics comes along and blows them away. The company moves to "own" the market for rubber pants used over infant cloth diapers. Pampers comes along and blows them away. Now, the company moves on to education.
  

At Workforce Innovations this week in New Orleans, a new effort will launch to build networks across organizational and political boundaries. Innovating Networks represents an effort to leverage the web to capture the insights from Workforce Innovations.

A number of bloggers have signed up to cover the events.Tune into Innovating Networks over the next few days and see how this new effort evolves.

The Milwaukee 7 (M7) WIRED is helping to support the developmentof a new water cluster in Southeast Wisconsin. The focus of the effort is on developing the talent pipline and innovation networks needed to expand fresh water technologies.

This summit follows a similar event held last year. In the past year, the M7 team has developed a good mapping of regional assets.

With this baseline report in hand, the M7 Water Council is working to align the regional freshwater research community and water-related industries to establish the Milwaukee Region as the global capital for freshwater research, economic development and education

To help put the Milwaukee region at the forefront, the M7 Water Council created three key committees:

• The Research/Emerging Technologies Committee will identify opportunities for development and resources that exist, and find SBIR and other funding sources to help research projects and generate the economic development benefits coming from it. They will work to establish networks and contacts between academic and research facilities and water-related businesses, and are discussing better ways to use science and technology to address regional, national and international water issues.
• The Marketing/Branding Committee will identify the “rock stars” of the water-related businesses, education and research resources in the region.  They will research what and how the Silicon Valley and the Research Triangle got started and how it can apply to establishing our region as the Global Freshwater Capital.
• The Education/Outreach Committee will help connect research and academics with water-related companies to fuse knowledge and talent in a seamless system designed to boost our ability to get things devised, developed, produced and sold from the minds of talented employees to the markets around the world in need of water-related goods and services.  The Education and Outreach Committee will identify the existing programs available for education and outreach in the region to make full use of them, and to develop additional, customized programs only if deemed necessary. 

One of the major challenges we face in the years ahead will be integrating education, economic development and workforce development. The old federal programs-- many of them stretching back to the 1930's -- create turf in our regions.Defending this turf has not only wasted resources. It has also kept us from seeing new opportunities that are fast emerging for innovation.

Next week, at Workforce Innovations, Innovating Networks, a new collaborative web site, will launch. To learn more about how this initiative fits with Workforce3One and WIRED Nation, download the attached white paper.

Innovating Networks is an online community of workforce development professionals and economic development practitioners.  This collaborative web site provides an opportunity to share best practices, success stories and all types of information using Web 2.0 tools while networking and interacting with professionals and practitioners from across the country. It's a promising initiative to bridge the divide among education, economic development and workforce development professionals.

I'll be reporting from Workforce Innovations in New Orleans next week.

The Piedmont Triad has announced five new grant awards, totaling $424,000.

Here's a summary:

Earlier this week, the Delaware Innovation Valley Network (DVIN) announced its first innovation grant award: The Wistar Institute will receive $89,000 to support the Wistar Biomedical Technician Training (BTT) Program, a two-year workforce development program in the biosciences. Wistar is partnering with the Community College of Philadelphia.

Here's a description of the course:

Biomedical Technician Training

BTT 101
Biomedical Technician Training Practicum
0-0-35-3
Hands-on experience with data record keeping, laboratory tasks and routines, and the use and maintenance of lab equipment and reagents. Includes 345 hours of in-depth skills training in various resource laboratories at The Wistar Institute or a comparable research laboratory. Prerequisite: Permission of the Biomedical Training Academic Coordinator and completion of the Orientation to Biomedical Technology.

You can read more from a press release here.

On July 1, DVIN completed the second round for proposals for the Innovation Investment Fund, which will provide more than $2.4 million in funds over the next three years to support training and capacity building programs in the life sciences workforce in the Delaware Valley, a 14 county region.

You can find a copy of the DVIN Investment Guidelines as an attachment to this post.

A couple of months ago, Maine's Office of Innovation released a review of its cluster strategy. Launched about five years ago, the strategy is designed to focus resources on investments with the highest probability of transforming the state's economy.

The report includes a particularly useful drawing of how the emerging and established clusters connect.

We will be seeing more use of visual tools to explain cluster strategies. The reason is simple. The concept of clusters is inherently spatial. The focus is not only on geographic proximity but (and this factor is more important) on the relationships among organizations and firms.

These drawings also highlight another, trend: the move toward more organic descriptions of economic activity and away from more traditional, mechanistic visual models.

As we move to integrate business clusters and occupational clusters, we will see career pathways in the form of maps. Again, the complexity of these connections (they are not linear) makes maps most useful.

You can read more about the Maine cluster initiative here.

The attachments include the Maine reports.

One of the great advantages of the WIRED initaitive comes in building new approaches to project-based learning in high schools. Here's an excellent example from Denver metro in biosciences:

A cutting-edge project designed to deliver hands-on training and equipment to Denver Metro high school teachers has come to a successful conclusion, and as a result, high school students throughout the region have had the opportunity to conduct more than 6,000 DNA-related experiments in the classroom during the 2007-08 school year.

Read more.

The project is designed to equip high school teachers and students with hands-on instruction in molecular biology and information about careers in Colorado’s bioscience industry.

The Community College of Aurora has launched this initiative and maintains a web site (Opening Minds to Bioscience) where you can learn more.

Down To Business: St. Louis Gets Serious About Tech Talent

Here is a follow up to the recent talent mapping post.  This article by Rob Preston, Editor of Information Week, puts the entire initiative in perspective.  I love this quote which obviously sums up the paradigm shift we are all leading, "The guiding principle: Regional economic development isn't just about dangling tax incentives and other subsidies in front of companies. It's increasingly about assuring local companies, and those considering moving in, that they'll have access to enough talented tech professionals, so critical to driving every business."

For more information on this initiative, contact Blair Forlaw .

Educational attainment is the single most important driver of regional economic development. So, it's no surprise that leading communities are starting to explore how to boost educational opportunities, as an economic development strategy.

As this strategy evolves, the separation between economic development and workforce development will dissolve.

Last week, two important events took place. Both involve new types of scholarship programs.

PromiseNet 2008

Since its launch a couple of years ago, the Kalamazoo Promise has focused civic leaders on new approaches to create incentives for education. The initiative provides college scholarships to children in the Kalamazoo City Schools. Watch a video briefing of the Kalamazoo Promise.

Educational incentives -- directed toward people -- have a direct impact on economic outcomes (higher incomes over a lifetime). Economic incentives directed toward companies generally do not work and are largely a waste of money. PromiseNet 2008 brought together representatives from 75 communities across the country to explore college scholarships for city school children. The event marks the beginning of a national movement toward community scholarships.

Read more: Kalamazoo PromiseNet conference to share programs' expertise.

Early child education scholarships

In another event last week, I attended a conference at the Federal Reserve in Minneapolis for the Big Ten schools and the University of Chicago. We focused on the importance of education (human capital, as the economists would have it) to economic outcomes in the Great Lakes. Our major research universities are exploring new avenues of collaboration.

At lunch yesterday, Art Rolnick, an economist with the FRB in Minneapolis, briefed us on a new scholarship pilot that foucses on early child care. The scholarship program is remarkably simple: it awards parents of young children with a scholarship for early education. This focus on early education as an economic development strategy has a strong foundation of evidence to support it. Read more.

The prestigious Committee for Economic Development in Washington DC strongly supports this strategy. The focus on early childhood development is closely connected to new learning in brain development. Here's an excellent overview by Joan Stiles, a cognitive scientist at UCSD.

In the wake of BIO 2008, two important bioscience initiatives have appeared.

The first is in California, where  the Southern California Biomedical Council (SoCalBio), BIOCOM and BayBio, which together represent life science firms and research organizations across California,  announced an alliance to promote the state’s life science industry. You can read more here.

The second is in Georgia, where a group of communities and organizations around Atlanta announced their first regional branding initiative in the life sciences. according to news reports: "The Innovation Crescent Work Ready Region will focus on establishing a stronger link between education and workforce development for life sciences companies." Read more.

In Washington yesterday, the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation released an important study on the impact of career academies. The report represents the first rigorous evaluation of career academies.

After evaluating graduates from nine career academies, the authors found that eight years after graduation, the career academy graduates had significantly higher employment and earnings.

The report also dispels one of the more dangerous myths we share today: that career and technical education in high school limits post secondary options.

To quote from the summary (in language that is a bit stilted, but you'll get the idea):

The findings demonstrate the feasibility of improving labor market preparation and successful school-to-work transitions without compromising academic goals and preparation for college. Investments in career-related experiences during high school can produce substantial and sustained improvements in the labor market prospects and transitions to adulthood of youth. In fact, Career Academies are one of the few youth-focused interventions that have been found to improve the labor market prospects of young men.

There are about 2,500 career academies across the U.S. Ft. Wayne is one city that has committed itself to this strategy.

You can can read more about the report here and here.

You can download a copy of the report here.