Rural Innovation
Earlier this year, the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan think tank whose mission is “to advance solutions that empower entrepreneurs and investors to forge a more dynamic economy in America” released its “Distressed Communities Index” earlier this year, which sorts US communities by county and zip code based on their level of economic prosperity from 2014-2018. Those communities range from “distressed” to “prosperous” based on educational and economic data, rural Americans living in distressed zip codes increased to 23.6% from 2000-2018, while urbanites in distressed zip codes declined over the same period. Rural communities are concentrated in the US South, which contains 35% of all US zip codes, but over two-thirds of those labeled as “distressed” by the study, and nearly half of “at-risk” communities.
Entrepreneurship and innovation aren’t luxuries reserved for Silicon Valley and the US northeast; rural and suburban communities can build infrastructure for the jobs of tomorrow, too, and the time to start doing so is now. Organic job growth certainly will not be as politically appealing over time as more traditional economic development efforts (read: pay for jobs with cash incentives, tax credits, etc.)– how can something that, if executed correctly, could take in excess of a decade to come to full fruition benefit an elected class of public servants that run on two, four- or six-year cycles (in the case of US Senators)? Innovative solutions can be designed to generate quick wins in the short/medium, and more profoundly, the long term; the process takes buy-in from the public and private sectors.
This is not to say that traditional economic development strategies that deploy incentives to lure large companies to communities are arcane in nature; rather, these incentives can play a huge role as a deal-sweetener for these large multinationals, and, when employed effectively can serve as a fine complement to a well-thought rural/suburban innovation strategy. There are examples around the world of communities successfully executing innovation strategies that, over time, enable those areas to attract larger companies that otherwise would have passed them over – in the UK, for example, 58% of rural communities were found to engage in innovation activities from 2012-2014. In each, community leadership developed and executed tailored innovation strategies focused around building on existing assets and leveraging partnerships to achieve results at scale.
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