In the simplest terms possible, explain what it is that you do.
REI is a think-and-do-tank that takes the latest thinking in regional economic development and translates it into strategies and policies.

What does REI stand for and how does it serve the Greater Cleveland area?
It stands for Center for Regional Economic Issues, and in the past it has helped shape the public debate over the economic future of our region. It has worked with our civic leadership including political leaders, businesses, and foundations to identify critical regional economic issues.

What is the history of REI and how did it start? REI started in 1984 as an outgrowth of a study performed by the RAND Corporation. That was the first regional economic assessment in NEO. The RAND Study recommended the formation of a regional economic center to collect data and analyze issues. REI started out at Cleveland State University, after a few years to the Federal Reserve Bank, then it went to the Weatherhead School where it’s been for the past 15 years.

What is the relationship with Cleveland State University? For a number of years, the relationship between Cleveland State University and REI had been a competitive one. When I arrived at REI in August 2003, members of the business leadership in Cleveland asked me what I was going to do about the competition between REI and Cleveland State University. I was also told by people in the region that REI should be eliminated. Since August we have worked to build partnerships with CSU and other players in the region and now we have a very good working relationship.

You’ve identified a region in Northeast Ohio called NEO-19. Could you explain what that is?
Well, there are 19 counties in Northeast Ohio, and we’ve subsequently expanded it to 22 counties, in that we’ve identified the ones that make economic sense in our region. There are also numerous sub-regions (for example TeamNEO has 13 counties). But for our purposes, we’re looking at Northeast Ohio from a global perspective, and it makes sense to look at the region as broadly as possible.

How do you work with all 22 counties?...it seems broad.
The region is broad, but they share a number of similarities: historic, geologic, economic. Most of those 22 counties were part of the Western Reserve of Connecticut settled by Revolutionary War veterans who were given land. So the settlers in Northeast Ohio were from Connecticut, whereas people in the Southern part of Ohio immigrated from Virginia & West Virginia. That's why when you go South of New Philadelphia, Ohio, they call it Oh-hi-ya.

What do you think the major two or three challenges are for our region?
The first challenge is to build new patterns of civic behavior, and this requires civic leadership to define ways for people to work together. It requires building trust and relationships, that’s number one. The second challenge is to integrate our colleges and universities more aggressively into an economic development agenda. Our third major challenge is to integrate our school system (pre-K thru 12) into our post-secondary education system.

I notice that regionalism wasn’t one of your priorities?
Well, regionalism starts with dialogue, relationships and trust. So until we address the whole question of building new patterns of civic behavior, we won’t be able to address regional issues.

How would you suggest doing that?
We have to start with first setting aside the rhetoric about regionalism and focus on specific opportunities for regional cooperation. We’ve started down this path in economic development with initiatives such as TeamNEO. We need dozens more regional initiatives to build the fabric of the Northeast Ohio region. I would be looking for other opportunities where collaborations among different entities can generate general benefits. For example, I would be looking for ways to save money by cooperative buying efforts via regional governments. We could explore regional growth strategies to minimize the high costs of sprawl; there are literally hundreds of initiatives that could cross political jurisdictions. Instead, we are focused on the no-win game of trying to restructure county governments.

Why do you say it’s no-win? It seems that it would save some money.
If we can collaborate across jurisdictions, we can find opportunities. But if we enter the discussion with the intent to eliminate political positions, we immediately paint people into a corner. We need creative civic leadership to find positive-sum equations, where you and I collaborate and we get three, rather than a zero-sum game where in order for me to gain, I have to take something from you. If we frame regionalism as a zero-sum game, we’ll never get anywhere.

Why is there a mentality of zero-sum and limited opportunites in our town?
It’s a matter of mis-diagnosing the problem. For example, Cuyahoga County has high levels of public employment, and that means we have a relatively high overhead that we need to support.

That goes to police, fire, the multiple municipal governments.
If we’re going to get out of the continuous cycle of increasing tax rates to pay for the infrastructure, we’ll need to find a way for governments to collaborate to be more effective and more efficient.

So you're doing more with less?
Being more productive, working smarter, not harder.

Doesn’t that mean laying people off?
Not necessarily. It may mean not hiring people as we grow, it may mean not replacing people as they retire, it may mean expanding job definitions, it may mean relying more on e-government services.

How important are the unions in this equation?
The unions are a critical partner in defining new opportunities for government service. They have to be a full partner in any efforts to make our public services more efficient and productive.

Have they been a partner in these discussions?
I don’t think the discussions have even been taking place. Instead we’ve been diverted by headlines and by rhetoric to think of regionalism as a zero-sum game where somebody wins and somebody loses. So the conversation has not really been joined, or structured, or framed. Now, the exception to that is Cleveland State University’s new effort to develop a new Economic Development fund within Cuyahoga County. That represents an important initiative in the direction that I’m talking about. But that represents just one of a dozen initiatives that we should be discussing.

What do you see as the biggest impediments to economic growth for our region?
The biggest impediments are the lack of civic leadership, which includes the lack of leadership historically by the business community, the political leadership, the foundations and the universities. All that is beginning to change, especially in the universities, where there are new levels of cooperation between Case's president Ed Hundert and Cleveland State University's president Michael Schwartz, who have made it known that they are partners in economic development. It’s starting to change with the foundations in regards to their extraordinary Fund for Our Economic Future. Now we need to build a strong connection between our foundations and our universities.

In your opinion, how does the Cleveland Municipal School District play into the region’s economic future?
The Cleveland Municipal School District is perhaps the biggest opportunity and the biggest potential liability that we have. We are starting to make strides in improving the performance of the school system, but we have an enormously long way to go. The fundamental challenge is for the community to embrace the school system and realize these challenges cannot be met by the school system alone. We have 14-year old kids dropping out of school without any adult supervision. They are making the most important decision of their lives, yet we allow these kids to make this decision, which has long-term consequences for our community and region.

Is Barbara Byrd-Bennett a savior or a flawed leader?
Turning around a school system like Cleveland’s is an enormous undertaking. We have a leader in Barbara Byrd-Bennett who’s neither a miracle worker nor a villian. She is however focusing on the critical issues that need to be addressed from the standpoint of economic development, but this is my point. Turning around the school system is a community obligation, it is not the responsibility of one person. And thus far, the community has not risen to the challenge.

Area foundations have formed the Fund For Our Economic Future. In your opinion, what is the potential for this fund?
The Fund has an enormous potential to provide alignment and focus to a variety of economic development initiatives. The success of the Fund will turn however, on its relationship with the universities. You cannot build a high-income, knowledge-based economy without putting our colleges and universities in the middle of the agenda. This was a fundamental message of the Pogue Commission Report which came out last week.

You’ve worked all around the country. How does Cleveland compare when it comes to regional cooperation, so-called public-private partnerships, and regional leadership?
The paradox of Cleveland and Northeast Ohio is that the region is probably better positioned than most to deal with the new realities of globalization. However, the regional leadership goes back to the discussion of civic behavior, and the regional leadership is hobbled by a lack of trust. There's a pattern of back-biting and personality politics that reminds me more of the depressed economies of Louisiana and Mississippi, and that attitude needs changing. My sense is that the change will come with a new generation of civic leaders.

Some people have said a new generation is emerging with Dave Abbott of The George Gund Foundation, Ed Hundert, the President of Case Western Reserve University, Brad Whitehead of the Cleveland Foundation...
I would actually say it is people like Ronn Richards [Executive Director of The Cleveland Foundation], Ed Hundert, David Sweet [President of Youngstown State University], Luis Proenza [President of University of Akron], Roy Church [President of Lorain Community College] and David Beach [EcoCity Cleveland]. There’s been a lot of churn in positions and there’s a struggle going on between old ways of doing things and new ways of doing things. The old way of making civic decisions depended on a relatively small handful of civic leaders defining an agenda and setting it in motion. The new path involves combining public participation with leadership direction, in an open, more transparent process of civic decision making. REI is working hard to build the infrastructure to support this new open source model for economic development. But change is threatening to some, and we often find resistance to new ideas.

How much do you think race plays a factor in the lack of trust in our region?
I think race may play a factor, but I think the issue of trust goes far deeper than that. I don’t think that looking at it in black and white terms is the most productive way to view it. What you have is a region that hasn’t grown. When an economy doesn’t grow, it’s hard to keep a political balance. It’s like riding a bicycle, when you slow down, it’s harder to keep your balance. Our region hasn’t been growing, so we pit one public university against another, or one community against another, and that may have racial overtones. But the core problem is a lack of growth and new economic opportunity.

So a strong economy will solve this racial problem?
It will facilitate more racial cooperation. When you look at at city like Atlanta, you see a city where racial politics will always be a part of public life, but there are ways to find mutual benefits and it’s easier to to do that when the economy is growing.

You’re developing what you are calling the Innovation Roadmap. What is it, and how would people in this region participate?
We have developed a road map that has defined a balanced, regional economic strategy involving five components: we need to build our brainpower, translate our brain power into wealth through entrepreneurship and innovation. We need to create quality, connected places for people to live and work. We need to define branding strategies to tell our story. Most important though, we need new habits of civic leadership that involve dialogue and inclusion. I’ve developed this road map over the last 10 years and it’s very close to the road map that Richard Shatten was developing at the time of his death. Civic entrepreneurs and civic leaders can use this road map to guide their strategies within their neighborhoods, their broader community and the region.

Is it available online?
Yes, at http://weatherhead.cwru.edu/rei/approach.htm

One of the things that has defined your project, is the articulation of a certain set of principles that define how you think we should go about the business of doing economic development in this region. Could you explain these principles?
We have a Making Change design team that includes professionals at REI plus consultants. Out team is developing tools and processes to encourage public participation and civic engagement. At the core of this process, we are defining a set of simple rules about how we will behave towards one another. These rules are important for a simple reason: in the civic space, that is, the place where economic development takes place, there are no rules unless we impose them on ourselves. So it's very important to come to some basic agreements about how we relate to one another. If we don’t have these rules in place, it’s very difficult to build trust. Without trust there can be no lasting relationships, because building trust and relationships in a global world is critically important. We’ve moved into an age of networked capitalism. In this age, a community with high levels of trust can move more quickly and responsively and be more adaptive and more flexible. In a word, the community can become more competitive, so building trust and relationships is becoming an economic imperative.

Your team has also been using the model of Appreciative Inquiry (AI) to work with large groups.
AI offers a set of tools and disciplines to guide large groups toward positive outcomes. Increasingly, we need skills and processes that are scalable, that is, we need a tool kit that can be used within neighborhoods and across the region. AI provides that kind of tool kit. AI starts with a fundamental premise: organizations move in the direction of the things they talk about. If we want to move a community or region toward new levels of collaboraton, we need to guide discussions into what those collaborations could be and how we can implement them.

You have a few core projects that your team has been working on. Could you briefly explain these?
Our core projects involve monitoring services to the civic leadership in Cleveland. We’re in the process now of defining what those monitoring reports should look like in collabotation with our partners at CSU. In addition, we provide strategy, guidance and we translate research into actionable agendas. We also support advanced economic research by our faculty. Finally, we encourage and support collaboration and cooperation that demonstrates President Hundert’s vision for our university, which is to provide the most powerful learning environment in the world. We build those learning environments through our collaborations.

How important is perception versus reality in this region?
I think the leadership in Northeast Ohio is missing the major opportunities. Every community in the country faces globalization, every region faces underperforming school systems. Every region also faces the challenge of little money. But few regions face these challenges with the assets you find in Northeast Ohio. You find opportunities within the traditional sectors such as industry to generate new jobs, and we also have new opportunities in health care as a global business. And creative industries including creative digital media, and sustainable energy systems - all of these opportunities lie in front of us, yet we spend our time talking about how we can eliminate a couple of seats on a county commission.

REI is not the only group working on economic development in this region. In fact, our’s has been called the most studied region in the country. Other groups include CSU’s Levin College of Urban Affairs, TeamNEO, JumpStart, NORTECH, the Northeast Ohio Council on Higher Education (NOCHE), the Community Development Corporations (CDCs), and the City of Cleveland’s Economic Development Department. How do you propose to work with these various groups and work together?
We’re building a new model for economic development based on open systems and collaboration, and it’s a big knowledge management problem or opportunity. We can identify experts in virtually every area in which we need to compete. By tying these experts together, connecting them, and supporting them with the appropriate Internet infrastructures, we can create new opportutnities for the region. REI’s role is to be one of the architects of this innovation economy.

Do you see this as a struggle of differences between Cleveland's traditional top-down versus open source collaboration?
The changing world of economic development in Northeast Ohio is happening all over the country; traditional business groups are combining and re-defining their missions. The traditional top-down structures have toppled in region after region. The same pressures that have caused corporations to develop a flatter, more efficient structure are operating in the civic space as well. In the civic space we need new ways of coming together, framing issues, discussing options, and implementing our choices. REI is the only regional economic center that is focused on how we can adapt principles of knowledge management to these civic processes. In the civic space, the process is the product. Because in the civic space, without consensus, there can be no implementation. In the world of hierarchy, public participation is simply a step in the process; you develop a plan and you have a public hearing. That model no longer works, as we’ve seen.

Making Change: Networks for our Innovation Economy takes place Mon 5/17 from 8:30PM to 1PM at the Ritz, bringing people up to date with the emerging networks that our transforming our regional economy. You’ll come away with new ontacts and a new sense of possibilities for our region. <i>Cool Cleveland's</i> Thomas Mulready may be a featured civic entrepreneur along with Jack Ricchiuto, Valdis Krebs, Tony Kuhl, and Dave Nash, among others.

Interview and photos by Thomas Mulready (:divend:)