Wednesday, I was the keynote speaker at Community Collaboration, a regional initiative for economic development in Spencer, Iowa. This northwest area of Iowa started to do economic development marketing on a regional basis in 1992. Today they are looking to expand their work geographically and the conference included several counties from SW Minnesota.
Why more regionalism? Entrepreneurs and companies looking to move to an area don’t care about boundaries, whether they are city, county or even state borders. They are looking for quality of life for themselves and their employees and cooperation and collaboration from the various entities in an area.
Regions that can come together to help develop their competitive advantage and use that advantage to create some critical mass and clusters will be the winners in the long run. There were several great examples of cooperation cited at the conference taking place in NW Iowa and SW Minnesota. With the enthusiasm and interest displayed by this group I’m guessing that it will grow and prosper in the future.
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