PCRD staff member Christine Nolan recently attended the C2ER (Council for Community and Economic Research - formerly ACCRA) conference in Atlanta, GA, giving a presentation on one of PCRD’s newest grants – Rural Economic Development Policy: Crossing the Next Rural Frontier – as part of a panel on cluster models and their use.
The overall theme of the conference was Creating Your Own Regional Talent Advantage, and the conference organizers at C2ER took full advantage of the recent upsurge of interest in research into human capital and its role in creating economic development and advantage in a global knowledge economy. The program ranged from the workforce in 2020 to the impact of young professionals programs, migrating graduates, measuring K-12 school success, and the utility of occupational cluster models in conjunction with industry cluster models.
Ms. Nolan’s discussion covered the topic of identifying and analyzing occupational clusters, as well as industry clusters, with an eye to discovering linkages that lead to “hot spots” of innovation and knowledge across the United States. Other panel members included Rich Bryden of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at the Harvard Business School, and Ed Feser of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
C2ER has now posted all available presentations from the conference to its website. To see the Nolan and Bryden presentations click on “Cluster Models” in the presentations listed for Thursday, May 15th.
The PCRD grant’s principal funder is the US Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, and the research team includes experts from Indiana University’s Indiana Business Research Center (IBRC); Strategic Development Group Inc. (SDG) located in Bloomington, Indiana; the Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI) at the University of Missouri and Economic Modeling Specialists Inc. (EMSI) of Moscow, Idaho.
