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Welcome - Issue 11

Welcome to the EconomicDevelopment.org newsletter. We’d love to hear your feedback or questions about EconomicDevelopment.org, so feel free to drop us a line at connect@economicdevelopment.org. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google+ and Pinterest.

Thank you for your support and participation in our community!

The EconomicDevelopment.org Team

Featured Contributor: Andrew Redden

Andrew Redden

By Tarryn Landman

We recently launched a new series here at EconomicDevelopment.org highlighting some of our contributors (you can see the first Featured Contributor post here). These talented folks share their insights as practitioners and experts in the economic development field, so we wanted to give the economic development community a chance to get to know them a little better.

For this edition, I chatted with Andrew Redden, whose post on whether small town economic development is more difficult was one of the top 10 posts of EconomicDevelopment.org’s first year.

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Burgeoning Business in Brick City: Lessons from Audible.com

By ICIC

Pick up any newspaper and its plain to see that mayors in cities everywhere love to announce new policies and attend ribbon cuttings. Putting a spotlight on their city’s redevelopment is something that mayors should be proud about.

But while the glory tends to go to the city’s mayor, efforts by the private sector often fly under the radar. In reality, many cities’ achievements could not be possible without the involvement of the business community. As we’ve noted before, businesses play a critical role in the competitiveness and economic growth of our cities.

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Why Ohio is an Intelligent Community success

By Lou Zacharilla

On Monday October 21, 2013 the Intelligent Community Forum will announce the Smart21 communities for 2014. Chosen from competitors around the world by an international panel of judges, these are the places that best embrace the principals of the Intelligent Community movement. For 15 years the Intelligent Community Forum has studied communities and determined best practices in the use of broadband and Information and Communications Technology that enable communities to seize the economic opportunities of the broadband based economy. The Smart21 list announcement will kick off the annual symposium at the Walsh University Institute for the Study of the Intelligent Community. Walsh University is in North Canton, Ohio, USA and Ohio is a hotbed of Intelligent Community activity. In this video the co-founder of the Intelligent Community Forum, Lou Zacharilla discusses Ohio’s success.

You can watch the video here.

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Review: “Makers” by Chris Anderson and “Makers” by Cory Doctorow

By Brock Dickinson

Makers: Separating Fact from Fiction

Once upon a time not so long ago, computer programmers wore starched white shirts and stodgy ties, and worked in immaculate corporate spaces with giant machines called ENIAC and Colossus. But the anarchic, transformative power of these tools was too great to be constrained by the corporate world, and a generation of hippie hackers with names like Jobs, Wozniak and Gates threw off their ties and sparked an information revolution from their California garages. It’s a story we know well, but it’s also one we’re about to see retold in the field of manufacturing. Additive manufacturing, digital fabrication – however we choose to label it, the radical shift in “making” has broken the old model of assembly lines, of hierarchical shiftwork and production, and even of factories themselves. Ladies and gentlemen, manufacturing has – quite literally – left the building.

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