What is the Southern Minnesota Regional Competitiveness Project?

The Southern Minnesota Regional Competitiveness Project is a partnership of organizations, businesses and government agencies working together to create an strategic economic development plan for southern Minnesota. The Rural Policy Research Institute, based at the University of Missouri, Columbia, created the Center for Regional Competitiveness as a research institute for regional competitiveness and regional development policy. Working together across southern Minnesota, these partners aim to craft a coherent strategy to bring promising new economic opportunities to the region.

Click here to find a report on the region's economic opportunities, the summary of findings from 10 Local Roundtables, and the presentation from November's Regional Roundtables.

Identifying opportunities

Identifying opportunities will depend on two key elements.  The first is the Region’s ability to achieve the critical mass necessary to compete in the global economy.  This in turn rests on how well businesses, local governments, development organizations, and others can forge partnerships throughout the Region.  The second is the Region’s capacity to tap into innovation and foster entrepreneurship, recognizing that global competition makes business recruitment an increasingly costly and less effective strategy than it has been in the past. 

This project will craft a Region-wide strategy built on these key drivers of 21st century economic success.  Specifically, the project will identify the Region’s most promising economic development opportunities and the steps and investments necessary to capture them.  The key steps in the project will be to assess the Region’s cornerstone economic assets, the Region’s most promising economic potential in the global economic race, and the best investments on which to compete.  Recognizing that a good strategy must have champions, a critical goal of the project will be to create a sustaining forum for Region-wide partnership to drive the development strategy.   

Learn more about the Regional Competitiveness strategy with this PowerPoint presentation.

Project Phases

• Phase 1—Assess the Region’s economic baseline.  Working with key organizations in the Region, the Regional Competitiveness Project (RCP) analytical team will complete a baseline assessment of the Region’s economy.  This baseline will project the economic course if nothing changes, benchmark performance against other regions, identify key economic links to other regions and nations, and identify key business clusters.  This phase will also collect information on current development efforts in the Region and synthesize conclusions from other studies of the Region.

• Phase 2—Hold regional roundtables.  In partnership with many groups throughout the Region, RCP will complete a series of roundtables to assess its economic assets through the eyes of leaders in the Region.  The agenda for the roundtables will be informed by the summary assessment derived in Phase 1.  Importantly, the roundtables will be used to begin creating a sustaining forum on economic development throughout the Region—a concept now known as regional governance.   This forum will play a critical role in selecting and implementing the region’s new development strategy.

• Phase 3—Identify the Region’s economic potential.  The RCP’s team of economic experts will develop a menu that presents the region’s most promising economic opportunities.  The menu will be based on in-depth analysis of the Region’s business clusters and economic linkages, but will also draw on results from the Roundtables.  This menu will be the centerpiece of a summit meeting on the Region’s economic future.  Feedback from summit participants will help RCP refine the list of development options to be evaluated more thoroughly.           

• Phase 4—Craft a 21st century strategy for the Region.  RCP’s expert team will conduct a comprehensive analysis of the Region’s preferred options.  Specifically, this analysis will identify the projected economic impacts of investments in the alternative development options.  The alternative scenarios will form the basis for an economic development strategy forum with the Region’s leadership team to finalize the Region’s development strategy.  These decisions would be synthesized into an economic strategy blueprint for the Region.  The strategy would be rolled out at a second summit meeting on the Region’s future.  The development blueprint and a comprehensive report on the region’s economic future (compiling all of the information and analysis of the Region) would be made public at the summit (and also be made available on the web). 

Project Deliverables 

• Comprehensive report on the Region’s economic future—final production electronic format suitable for print or web distribution.
• Blueprint report on the Region’s economic development strategy—final production electronic format suitable for print or web distribution.
• Facilitation of ten local and three regional roundtables throughout the Region.
• Facilitation of two economic summits on the future of the Region.