The Obama administration’s enthusiasm for regional innovation clusters (or, RICs) as an organizing framework for sector-based economic growth and job creation is something that policy organizations (like Science Progress and the Brookings Institute) and regional columnists like me have followed closely over the past two years. In my articles I’ve described what clusters are and why they matter, what the administration is doing to catalyze clusters and in particular the unique role of Small Business Association Administrator Karen Mills in driving this approach. Given the new political realities of the mid-term election, I now offer some insight into cluster policy’s historic origins, and suggest that they may be a policy in which both parties can find common ground.
The Republican provenance of clusters in policy
Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter is the most widely recognized advocate for this strategy for regional competitiveness. And one of the earliest organizations formed to advocate for competitiveness—including a full embrace of clusters—is the Council on Competitiveness, a nonprofit policy group formed in 1986 by the chairman of then President Ronald Reagan’s Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, John A. Young; Porter was on the council’s board and still serves on its executive committee. The council sponsors conferences, seminars, and other special events to help catalyze new ideas and solutions, and to circulate its findings in topics that speak to competitiveness in specific regions (e.g. Brazil) and in key sectors (e.g. energy). The council’s Regional Initiatives reports serve to describe and prescribe cluster development process and strategies.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Cluster-Compatible
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