A Challenge Forward

Today’s blog is a book review of a sort. Read through the following and see if the challenge ahead is one we can answer with action.

Conclusions from The Smartest Places on Earth – Why Rustbelts are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation, by Antoine Van Agtmael and Fred Bakker (2016)

1. Past competition in the business world has kept technological advancements and cross-disciplinary scientific research from realizing their full potential.
2. Recent developments are eliminating the competitive reticence and sharing research findings, interdisciplinary academic research in technical fields, and process development innovations have emerged in new, collaborative models.
3. Communities that once were strong manufacturing centers have lost their cost/benefit competitive advantages and watched their businesses fail, disappear or move overseas.
4. These rustbelt communities are finding new ways to use technology to build smart manufacturing processes, products and plants. Private investment, corporate investment, small entrepreneurial investments, research university partnerships and government grants have funded brainsharing that has invented the region back into a major competitive power.
5. Public/Private partnerships or corporations are springing up in many places – both in the USA and Europe.
6. American support for this development is much larger and far reaching than what is found in Europe. Other parts of the world are even less positioned for this new means of competing globally.
7. 2008 was the year the recession in America began and economic bubbles burst in several economic arenas. Housing, real estate (both commercial and residential), mortgage lending, investment portfolios of mortgage securities, and much more combined to build a massive economic recession bordering on a depression.
8. Many jobs were lost; wiped out by the recession and relocation of entire industries overseas. At the same time massive retirements of baby boomers and pre-baby boomers occurred. The workforce shrank. Unemployment, however, grew exponentially. Clearly the economy was undergoing a huge and painful adjustment.
9. That adjustment continued for several years and in 2016 some new trends emerged. These may last several more years or undergo more evolution before settling into a new normal. Without much doubt the old normal is gone and probably forever.
10. What is needed is innovation and that comes from rethinking what we are trying to do, complete, discover
11. We have ideas; we have processes for those ideas; and we have outcomes. How do they all fit together and what innovative, creative thinking must go on in each to truly make them new and different?
12. We have the ability to create new things from nothing if we put our minds to it. The truth of the matter is – We don’t know what we know or don’t know – so we have to move forward into the future
13. Moving forward is done not alone but with others from different disciplines of thinking. Sharing knowledge both within and among groups leads to new discoveries and connections of data/disciplines/ideas that can be used in concert to discover new outcomes
14. New jobs, careers and disciplines emerge from all of this work
15. Entirely new cities could result; but what happens instead is renewal of old places. What is needed in each are systems and subsystems that provide the infrastructure for people living together – housing, transportation, shopping local, walkable streets, cooperative institutions (colleges, universities, schools, libraries, etc.), research institutions, private corporations and local and regional government agencies. Funding, too, comes when funding agencies with the resources see what is being created and in need of support.
16. Thus rustbelts become brainbelts. The critical key is brainsharing behaviors.
17. Brainsharing requires trust, humility, true search for common problems and their solutions, leading wherever it may toward a fresh new tomorrow.
18. From this work come many discoveries that may not be usable today by the current researchers, but others, by networking, will learn of the discoveries and find uses for them.
19. Meanwhile the primary quests are being worked on and solved. And those solutions are being bought and sold and employed in many new, exciting ways.
20. Economic development comes from this sort of collaborative living.
21. And meaningful life styles grow from this environment of ‘can do’. Communities are built that are true to themselves and each citizen living within them.
22. And life is Green with reduction of waste, efficient use of resources – food, housing, energy, investment funds, etc. – that sustainability of the community and of the planet are co-creations.
23. The way forward is together, in community. This relies on sharing and cooperating. 

Can we do this in America? Can we find the humility and goodwill and trust in one another to accomplish these great deeds? Or are we too selfish and self-centered to break free and live large in our own place on the planet?

Can we suspend our Trump distractions long enough to give brainsharing and brainbelts a try?

February 6, 2017