Along with his team at IRCT, Roland Anglin, is applying his knowledge of community economic development to study innovation in the field. The challenges facing those who are on the front lines of promoting people and place development have become acute. Challenges such as globalization weaken the ability of towns and cities to maintain economies that generate well-paying jobs and tax revenue.
Strategies such as corporate attraction, workforce development, and community-based economic development are not obsolete, but local policy makers and practitioners are constructing innovative ways of improving the impact of these and other development strategies. We see the beginnings of these experiments in rural and urban settings, but there is a need to see if these experiments and trends are widespread and vary in scope and method.
Project Details
The culmination of this project will be a published volume consisting of three distinct parts.
Review of economic development literature:
The literature review for the Innovation project focuses largely on academic research regarding the creation and use of public sector networks to foster and improve local economic development. At the conclusion of his book Promoting Sustainable Local and Community Economic Development, Dr. Anglin identified a pattern of successful and sustainable economic development strategies emerging from government bodies that are part of formal and informal networks. This literature review analyzes the research to determine whether this hypothesis is valid.
Survey of economic development professionals:
The project team has developed a survey for economic development professionals (including publicly elected officials and directors of nonprofits). The purpose of the survey instrument is to gauge the landscape of local economic development over the past five years. The survey was distributed to professionals in municipalities and nonprofits across the nation using both random and purposeful sampling methodologies.
Case studies in various fields of economic development:
Case studies for the Innovation project focus on the following fields of local economic development: governance (networking for local and community economic development), regionalism, rural development, arts and culture, workforce development, youth development, urban agriculture/green building, crime, technology, and higher education partnerships (for example, community colleges). The case studies will highlight examples of local, state and federal governments’ roles in promoting innovative economic development strategies, particularly through the use of networks and cross-field strategies (such as using the resources of community colleges to develop workforces in local communities).
Project Team
Stephen Abbott
Nagla Bedir
Kate Davidoff
Akira Drake
Allison Harris
Jessica Lau
Neha Patel
Jessica Remington
Areej Sabzwari
Kimaada Sills
