The circumstances leading to SSTI's 13th Annual Conference make this year's event critical. We encourage you to join us in Overland Park, Kansas October 21 - 23, 2009 to Seize the Moment. As you scan the conference website, you'll discover we're putting together our most complete and complex conference yet.
This year's conference will bring together distinguished speakers like Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School and Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation who will challenge conventional thinking; experienced practitioners who will share best practices; and, leading individuals who are breaking new ground in their attempts to build tech-based economies. Plus, we'll have four stimulating roundtable discussions examining some of the thorniest issues we're facing - improving metrics that are being used, re-examining equity programs, and engaging universities.
At this moment, every aspect of the U.S. economy is in a period of transformation. And nearly every aspect of getting out of the current mess is related to one or more of the fundamental principles of tech-based economic development, or TBED, for short. That's pretty impressive. The public/private programs, policies and investments being made to support TBED have never been as important or critical as they are at this moment.
Even so, the rules for TBED's fundamentals are in flux - capital access, university engagement, entrepreneurship assistance, research funding priorities, commercialization paths, you name it. To borrow from Ben Franklin, one of the nation's great innovators, "When you're finished changing, you're finished." In short, if your approach to promoting economic growth isn't evolving, you're writing its obituary.
To seize this moment, the visionary leaders of the TBED community need a forum to discuss how to turn the current realities into opportunities for innovation. SSTI's 13th Annual Conference provides that forum. We will seize the moment.
SSTI's annual conferences are unique events for the economic development field because they attract the top thinkers and doers from every critical element of the TBED community - state, regional, university, nonprofit, private industry, and federal decision makers and practitioners.
Over the coming weeks, we'll be highlighting parts of the conference content in the Digest, but for more details now, go to:
http://ssti.staging.10floor.com/email/420747.1/LH/www.ssticonference.org/
Registrations may be made by phone (614.901.1690), fax or online through the conference website at:
http://ssti.staging.10floor.com/email/420747.1/LS/www.ssti.org/Conf09/register.html
