Based on my keynote at the Akron Roundtable, April 20, 2017
My thanks to my hosts, Burton D. Morgan Foundation and Fasenmyer Foundation, and of course congratulations to the Akron Forum on your wonderful events. This is my first time in Akron, so I spent a little time with Google and learned about your city sons, Lebron James, and Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley, and the fact that Akron means summit, or high spot, so I guess we are now on the Acropolis of the Midwest.
Ecosystems for Growth
Since 2009, after three decades as entrepreneur, investor, and professor, I and a small band of collaborators have been tackling a fundamental problem facing hundreds of urban and quasi-urban economic regions around the globe: How to accelerate broad-based prosperity, using only existing regional assets, and to accelerate this growth in a way that is rapid, relatively cheap, robust and replicable. Now, almost a decade later, a pattern has evolved into a methodology that meets these criteria, and which appears to be self-sustaining and even self-accelerating. At the heart of this methodology are three guiding principles or action levers:
