On Sunday, we are launching our week-log Strategic Doing certification course at Purdue. The first class -- 23 economic and workforce development professionals -- draws from Indiana. We are focused on making our 14 county region around Purdue a hot spot for intensive collaboration using the new strategy disciplines for open networks. 
Extending collaboration has been a focus at Purdue since former President Martin Jischke appointed Vic Lechtenberg to lead the effort. Purdue has launched Discovery Park, an expanded Purdue Technical Assistance Program, and the Purdue Center for Regional Development, among other initiatives. The process continues. Last week, Purdue announced a new Innovation and Commercialization Center.
Strategic doing provides a disciplined framework for extending these collaborations, a kind of core technology to designing and managing complex collaborations in open, loosely connected networks.
We are building a national network of universities committed to this new discipline. So, for example, Michigan State is using this discipline in its engagement activities and Arizona State has used strategic doing to design its initiatives to build a solar cluster in Arizona. Virginia Tech is collaborating with Purdue to incorporate strategic doing in a new executive education course on regional engagement, through its Engagement Academy. The Virginia Tech course -- scheduled for May -- is designed to help regional leaders link and leverage their university assets to strengthen competitiveness.
The University of Akron is collaborating with Purdue, Michigan State, Arizona State and the University of Michigan, among others, to create a platform to explore federal policies to support extended collaboration among higher education, business, government, and non-profits. The discipline of strategic doing sits at the core of this new network focused on Transformative Regional Engagement.
In the coming months, we'll be announcing details of a national initiative to bring the disciplines of strategic doing to national scale. Michigan State, The University of Akron and Arizona State have been at the core of this effort.
One of the important opportunities comes in transforming the Great Lakes economy, where we have the highest concentration of colleges and universities in the country. In an important paper, James Duderstadt, past president of the University of Michigan, has explored this core strength of the Great Lakes economy.
In the most recent issue of Michigan State's Engaged Scholar magazine, I explore the possibilities of the practical dimensions of how we can build collaborations across organizational and political boundaries with a common strategic framework and a simple discipline to manage this complexity.
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