🔒Resources for fueling innovation, feeding Americans and boosting rural and urban areas economies | Resources for fueling innovation, feeding Americans and boosting rural and urban areas economies

While there's much animated public discourse about the role of the federal government in a high- debt environment, it's clear that states need to be cognizant of federal policies and programs to leverage the limited resources that do exist. So here's a synopsis of the administration's initiatives designed to drive economic growth through entrepreneurship and innovation through sectors and regions.

Building prosperity

Last month, I described in "Unexplored territory" a USDA roundtable on rural ventures led by the agency's Secretary Tom Vilsack. Shortly after publication, President Obama and Vilsack announced an initiative focused on driving rural innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development. In the Rural Economic Forum held during his three-day tour through Minnesota, Ohio and Illinois, Obama announced $350 million in initiatives to drive capital and opportunity to rural communities, including access to capital, job training and health care services. From the time he landed in office, Obama has included policies and programs that speak to the middle class and underserved communities. This year, by executive order, Obama created the Rural Council (which will get more media play in the fall); earlier this year, the Small Business Administration created the Council on Underserved Communities.

The president has also long spoken to urban issues. Consistent with the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program, the administration has recognized the strategic importance of urban centers, which possess both challenged inner cities and dense clusters of innovation assets that include research institutes, universities, capital and a high density of educated work forces. Brookings' research showed that the overwhelming majority of the nation's assets — infrastructure, airports, hospitals, universities, financial institutions, manufacturing plants — are concentrated in metropolitan regions and generate 90% of the nation's economic production, and that 75% of U.S. GDP is driven out of urban centers.

The administration established early on the Office of Urban Affairs to ensure consistent attention to the metros. This speaks to the power and potential of these more densely populated regions and to the challenges of transforming economically distressed areas (e.g. Dorchester and Roxbury, Mass.) often situated near innovation asset centers (e.g. Cambridge/Boston, Mass.).

Focus on food

First Lady Michelle Obama, too, has used her platform to speak to inner cities. She's combined her interest in obesity and healthy foods for children with the administration's city-focus to launch a $400 million Healthy Food Financing Initiative to bring grocery stores and health food retailers to so-called food deserts located in underserved urban and rural communities. Supported by Treasury, the initiative provides grants, loans and other programs to enhance access to healthy foods.

Private-sector groups have picked up on this urban focus as well. Harvard Business School professor and cluster advocate Michael Porter has focused his nonprofit Initiative for a Competitive Inner City on highlighting the market opportunities of inner-city ventures through policy conferences and by showcasing top-performing inner city ventures — through the "ICIC 100," like the Inc. 500 or Fortune 500 — all viewed through the lens of industry clusters. Recently, ICIC chose the Food 2.0 conference to showcase for its next inner city economic summit.

Rural economies are at the heart of food production in the United States and rely on denser urban markets as an outlet for their bounty. Energy too, seems a natural nexus for the rural-urban connection.

Joining as a region

Maine and other northern New England states are in a unique position to take advantage of this administration's urban and rural economy focus, as well as its cluster-centric economic development strategy. Each state has abundant natural assets in agriculture (food and wood products) as well as access to renewable energy (ocean energy in Maine, biomass across the region) to bring nutrition, consumer products and heat and light to rural and urban communities.

A single state focus is necessary but not sufficient. A broader regionalism — linking both urban and rural markets across borders — is needed to create a collective asset base that will enable northern New England to leverage its strengths while fortifying weaknesses. Linking, leveraging and aligning food and energy systems players, led by cluster development organizations like the Maine Food Producers Alliance and E2Tech, with similar organizations in New Hampshire and Vermont can create promise for creating an economic super-region in these mature and emerging markets.

With the debt and deficit environment as a constraint, these kinds of initiatives are both strategic and necessary. States need to collaborate and ally with what federal resources remain after the thinning we're likely to see in coming years.

Michael Gurau, president of Clear Innovation Partners, a Maine-based cluster development organization, can be reached at mgurau@clearinnovationpartners.com.