What is the Partnership for Southern Minnesota Regional Competitiveness?
The Partnership for Regional Competitiveness is a network of organizations, businesses and government agencies working together to create a strategic economic development plan on a regionwide basis. Our first project is the 38 counties of southern Minnesota. Working together across southern Minnesota, these partners aim to craft a coherent strategy, engaging the area's core strengths, to create promising new economic opportunities that will allow the region to compete on a global scale.
Through research produced by the Rural Policy Research Institute in Columbia, Mo., six industries were identified as southern Minnesota's core strengths.
The three established powerhouse industries are:
• Agriculture and food
• Manufacturing
• Healthcare
The three industries poised to be the most promising for growth:
• Bioscience
• Renewable energy
• High technology
By helping the businesses, organizations, institutions of education and government agencies to come together to identify ways they can work together, we hope to create economic opportunities beyond what each can achieve by itself, resulting in new jobs, better wages and a new economic strength for the region.
Key areas of focus
• A Regional Capital Fund: includes both equity (early to late-stage equity investment) and debt (startup capital network for high-risk ventures)
• Business Accelerator: building business expertise to move research to commercialization
• Stakeholder engagement: sustaining and leveraging engagement of key regional stakeholders
Our regional partners form our foundation for success
• Steering committee: AgStar, Center for Rural Policy and Development, Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation, Southwest Initiative Foundation
• Investment partners: AgStar, United FCS, Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, Alliant Energy, MinnStar Bank, Blandin Foundation, Workforce Development Inc., Bio-Business Alliance, Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation, Southwest Initiative Foundation, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, South Central Workforce Council, Southwest Workforce Council, Renewable Energy Marketplace, Region 9 Development Commission, Center for Rural Policy and Development
Identifying opportunities
The key to the Partnership for Regional Competitiveness is identifying opportunities, and this depends on two important 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.
The project's leadership team is crafting a region-wide strategy built on these key drivers of 21st century economic success. Specifically, the project has identified the region’s most promising economic development opportunities and the steps and investments necessary to capture them. To date, the steps taken include assessing the region’s cornerstone economic assets, the region’s most promising 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.
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