This interesting piece from the Sustainability Collective talks about issues relating to shifting residents' and leaders' perspectives, and gets at one of the toughest issues embedded in the Local Economy Revolution book: the need to not just get public feedback, but to crowdsource wisdom from members of the community. One of the impacts, and perhaps …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: Developing the Community Can Do attitude
I've been on a bit of a Las Vegas Downtown Project tear lately, in part because it embodies a whole new approach to a lot of the issues I raised in the book. One of the big challenges with talking about the Downtown Project as a model, though, is that there are a whole hell …
I've written a lot about the Downtown Project in Las Vegas lately, both here and on Wiseeconomy.com, and there's more yet to come. For me, it's a fascinating new approach to urban revitalization -- more comprehensive, more high-touch, and, most surprisingly, in many ways more accessible for organizations that lack their deep pockets than you might …
A brief follow-up to yesterday's post about building local entrepreneurship through accelerators, using Bad Girl Ventures as an example. Here's a short video of one of the BGV alumna, Robin Gentry McGee of Functional Formularies telling the story of how she got from realizing a significant gap in an increasingly important marketplace to running a …
Continue reading One more from Bad Girl Ventures: An Entrepreneur’s story
A couple of months ago I posted some description and video of a business accelerator program that I participated in this spring called Bad Girl Ventures. BGV operates in Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland, and it's a little unique in the world of entrepreneurship growth strategies because is borrows many of the tricks that tech startups …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: more on Accelerators for non-tech businesses (videos)
One of the things that surprised me a little about the aftermath of the LeBron James Returning to the Cavs announcement a couple of weeks ago was that the national press response divided pretty much evenly between pundits who regarded it cynically, and people -- not just sports people, but all kinds of writers -- who …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: Homecoming for Economic Impact
Two weeks ago, I was in Las Vegas for the SXSW v2v conference, which was a fascinating deep dive into the world of entrepreneurship, tech wizardry, innovation and general coolness (the last part of which left me feeling distinctly under-qualified...) I'll be writing more on that at wiseeconomy.com when I get a chance to come …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: The Micro-Factory Cometh
As part of my gig with EngagingCities, where I serve as the Managing Editor, I get to read tons of interesting blog posts, articles and the like, and share them with our 21,000+ readers worldwide. We focus on sharing the things that they won't find in mainstream press -- civil servant bloggers, small foundations' research, other people doing …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: High Tech for Smaller Cities
I was so delighted to see this post at the Preservation Rightsizing Network, focusing on the results of the Historic Preservation in America's Legacy Cities conference last month. The fact that this so-well-written summary came from the keyboard of Cincinnati Preservation Association's dynamo Margo Warminski didn't surprise me at all. In short, you should read …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas file: rebooting historic preservation
This article isn't going to win any Pulitzer prizes, but it contains a couple of very brief but important points about what small businesses (and entrepreneurs, which aren't quite the same but there's a lot of overlap) need from local governments. If you've been fed a steady stream of low-taxes-small-government-give-incentives, this might not be what …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: What do entrepreneurs need from local governments?
The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived 