I was the afternoon speaker for the first annual meeting of the Southeast Missouri Economic Development Alliance (SMEDA) on Friday. This six county region which comprises the boot heel of MO is just forming a regional initiate, seeing the wisdom of pooling their resources to market their region. It will be totally funded from the private sector and has some very strong leadership and vision.
At the conference they had a very interesting panel of regional economic development directors from MO, TN and AR.
Mark Young from the Delta Center (AR) said, “Just because we play football against each other on Friday night doesn’t mean that we can’t trust each other and help each other.”
Mike Philpot of WTIA (TN) talked about “coopetition”, a new word for “we are going to have to cooperate with each other before we start to compete against each other. If an industry lands next door to us, we all win.”
I’m seeing more and more regional initiatives. Towns are quickly realizing that they get lost in the clutter of 15,000 other towns around the country and that a way to effectively leverage their recourses is to work together with their neighbors.
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