ur May issue each year salutes the economic developers vying for your capital investment – the sell side. We keep the cover story and primary editorial focus on the buy side, where it belongs, which is on project information and location intelligence as communicated to us by your peers in corporate real estate. But there is plenty in this issue that gives credit where it is due in the economic development community.
The Top Groups feature with Honorable Mentions recognizes those local and regional EDOs that landed enough investment and/or new jobs to rise to the surface in our analysis of recent activity.
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Coverage of the fourth annual Competitiveness Award salutes the state-level economic development office that finished first in an index-based competition of new plant activity as tracked by our proprietary New Plant database (congratulations, Secretary Fain). And we are devoting more than a few pages of editorial space to our annual directory of economic developers. A more comprehensive directory can be found on our Web site, www.siteselection.com.
I want to draw your attention to another feature in this issue that takes economic development coverage in another direction, one all of our readers should find of interest. It’s the Universities and Economic Development article on page 310. We touch on this topic all the time, because higher education institutions, be they community colleges or leading research universities, factor into most location decisions. Their students are tomorrow’s work force.
I have visited communities all over the U.S. in my time with Site Selection, and in most cases, I can tell early on how plugged into economic development the local college or university is. To be sure, not all communities have a major university and many lack even a community college. But those that do have such assets nearby have no excuse for not maximizing them. Private enterprise can and should shape curricula that result in better courses and more marketable job skills for the students. University leaders can and should work with the local community to co-market their location to investors. And economic developers can and should make sure that local business leaders are at the same restaurant or conference room table as the business school dean or college president as often as possible.
The leadership of the Industrial Asset Management Council gets it. After each of the last two Professional Forums – in Corpus Christi, Texas, and San Diego, Calif. – a group of IAMC Board members and staff visited local universities (a local Texas A&M campus and San Diego State University, specifically) to talk corporate real estate and economic development with pertinent classes of students. Anecdotally, it’s hard to tell who benefited more – the IAMC folks who took impressive questions from the students or the students, who got to test some theories with the veterans. Let’s just say they all got something out of that investment in time.
No matter what type of reader you are – corporate real estate executive, economic developer, service provider or academic – think about this synergy in your community. If it’s not in place, then put it in place. If you think it is in place, then organize a meeting with all the players and bat some ideas around about other initiatives the team could try to improve on what’s in place – and improve the area as a location for business at the same time. It’s elementary.
Till next time,
Mark Arend