Leader Garden-Helping firms Cultivate and Grow their Leaders

The National Innovation Initiative (NII) submitted a report a number of years ago that listed key strategies to consider in promoting sustainable Economic Development.  This report listed three key categories that are listed below: 

Talent: 

• Establish tax-advantaged lifelong learning accounts to promote continuous learning and new skills.

 • Improve health and pension portability. 

• Reform immigration policies to attract the top science and engineering students. 

 Investment: 

• Allocate 3 percent of all federal agency research and development budgets toward grants that invest in novel, high-risk and exploratory research. 

• Establish 10 “Innovation Hot Spots” at regional locations over the next five years.

 • Reduce the cost of tort litigation by 50 percent, or 1 percent of the gross domestic product.

 Infrastructure: 

• Develop new metrics to understand innovation performance.

 • Build quality into all phases of the patent process. 

• Transform the patent database into a searchable tool.

 • Build a 21st century network infrastructure with healthcare as the test bed.

 *The full report is available for download at www.compete.org.

I found this report to be of interest because it did cover an area that is too often ignored, the area of Talent or Human Capital.  I read and hear many things about Economic Development and the focus that is often put in the areas of Investment and Infrastructure. 

Even today there is significant work being done in the State of Tennessee around these two core ideas.  

I propose that we spend significant time and other resources identifying and establishing Talent pools and sources for the types of future workers and leaders that we will need to sustain new investors here such as Hemlock Semiconductor and Wacker, who both will be building and operating polysilicate production facilities within our state. 

I will devote future posts to suggestions regarding how we might do this. 

The time is now and the opportunity will never be better.   

Let’s get it right this time!