This document discusses lessons learned from rural innovation initiatives. It argues that rural communities can leverage their strengths by collaborating across boundaries, embracing diversity and creativity, supporting entrepreneurs, and recognizing leadership in new ways. It provides examples of groups that have transformed their communities through strategic collaboration and a renewed focus on their assets, including initiatives in Youngstown, Ohio, eastern North Carolina, rural UK, and Oklahoma City. The overall message is that rural areas have an opportunity to reinvent themselves by tackling challenges together and imagining new possibilities.

1. Leveraging the Strengths of
our Rural Economies:
Lessons from the Front
Ed Morrison
Purdue Center for Regional Development
November, 2010

2. First, a thank you
to the Purdue Center for Regional Development
...for supporting this work in regional innovation
Sites of Strategic
Doing workshops

3. And to a group of extraordinary
innovators who are re-imagining rural
Rural innovators working
group organized by Dave
Ivan at Michigan State
University, Norm Walzer at
Northern Illinois University
and Mary Emery at Iowa
State University
Minneapolis, MN

4. We are operating in a different world
...a world of networks

5. We are operating in a different world
...a world of interdependence

6. We are operating in a different world
...a world of uncertainty, beauty and grace

7. We can collaborate to compete
...and move our communities to the next level

8. We can stop sitting
...behind our invisible fences
Our communities are marked by
invisible fences -- once working, now
broken -- that we refuse (or are too
afraid) to cross. To our children and
grandchildren, these invisible fences
make no sense.

9. We can develop
...an attitude
Young professionals in
Youngstown, Ohio promote a
new attitudes about their
hometown...Their message to
the older generation stuck in
the past: “Get over it”.

10. We can work on complex challenges
...together
Vision East, NC alliance of 8 workforce
boards
in Eastern North Carolina
October, 2010

11. We can imagine ourselves
...as rural innovators
National Endowment for Science,
Technology and the Arts
United Kingdom

12. We can rebuild our civic spaces
...to do some complex thinking

13. We can get serious about civility
...to do some complex thinking

14. We can rediscover the genius
...of our democracy
In May 1787, the
Framers adopted rules
of civility to guide their
deliberations in what
became known as “The
Brilliant Solution”

15. We can embrace diversity
...and recognize its creative value
In economic
development, diversity
is not a legal
mandate, it is a
creative imperative

16. We can embrace creativity
...with new eyes
Watermelon Festival:
Hope, AR Courtesy of
Mark Peterson,
University of Arkansas

17. We can recommit ourselves
...to our clients

18. We can support entrepreneurs
...wherever they show up

19. We can guide deeper conversations
...to innovate

20. http://vimeo.com/channels/strategicdoing
See Strategic Doing in
action on the Vimeo
Strategic Doing channel

21. We can recognize leadership
...in a new (old) way
"If your actions inspire others to
dream more, learn more, do more
and become more, you are a leader."
-- John Quincy Adams

22. We know we can transform
...even complex metro economies
The transformation of
Oklahoma City began
with eight people in
1993. I was privileged
to be a part of this core
team.

23. Across the country people see a new path
...which leaves the question....

24. What will you do?

25. Thank you!
Ed Morrison
Purdue Center for Regional Development
edmorrison@purdue.edu