I’m a proud TCU alum and avid Horned Frogs fan - I even used to work in City Hall for the City of Ft. Worth.  While I spent a lot of time boosting Ft. Worth (and, I’ll admit, occasionally disparaging Dallas), good things can and do happen there, too.  

For Example: an innovative and inspiring project (movement?) taking place on the other end of the Metroplex in a neighborhood called Oak Cliff – specifically, North Oak Cliff.   A few years ago, Oak Cliff was consistently mentioned in a list of places to avoid in Dallas.  You drove through – if absolutely necessary – but didn’t stop…and really, driving through wasn’t all that advisable, or so we were told.

Oak Cliff is an old neighborhood just south of downtown Dallas.  Full of  pre-WWII and mid-century homes, its location is also quite convenient to…well…all sorts of things, but perhaps most significantly the central business district.  With relatively low housing costs, and short commute times, close-in neighborhoods all over the country have experienced renaissances at various times, usually driven by young professionals and older hipsters looking for a urban feel in someplace besides New York.  Oak Cliff, too, is in the midst of its own renaissance – bootstrapped by some dedicated relative new-comers and some long-time residents who are carving out a name for their community based on tenacity, energy, and creativity.

You just have to check out the “Better Block Project” for yourselves.  The first project created a pop-up demonstration of what is possible: street-scaping, outdoor cafes, public art…the things that make PLACE matter.  They’re getting national coverage as a result (and deservedly so).  They intend to go again with a second project:  this time, a whole plaza, and the idea continues to draw ever-widening attention.  Dallas is even looking into making some of these improvements permanent.

Here’s the “After” and “Before” of the first Better Block Project demonstration on 7^th Street in Oak Cliff:

Image from CooltownStudios blog:  http://www.cooltownstudios.com/2010/04/27/crowdsourced-street-to-become-permanent

The project’s founders are central to Go Oak Cliff – a local community development not-for-profit, where they have included a page on How to Build a Better Block – taking the framework that made the first project a success and breaking it down into a brief “how-to” for the rest of us.

This is Economic and Community development 101:  involving the community in finding new ideas (in this case, a return to some old ideas!) about how to make a place vibrant and attractive again…thinking differently about the assets and resources available, and getting something done instead of waiting on “them” to come around and fix the problems.  It is art, culture, community development, urban planning, business development, and FUN rolled into one. And – proof positive – it works.  Vacant properties were used to become art galleries in the demonstration project with the blessings of their current owners.  Afterwards, “…immediately following our original better block, these vacant spaces were leased.”

Well done, Oak Cliffers.  Well done.

Beloit College – a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin – releases an annual “Mindset List” to remind faculty of the world as it appears to new students each year. Freshmen entering college this year comprise the class of 2014. The first thing I note is that these students were largely born in 1992…  I recall standing on the steps of the Old State House in Little Rock, Arkansas on a night in November of 1992, as then-Governor Bill Clinton emerged for a victory lap upon winning the presidential election…  ouch.

The list is below – but what does this have to do with economic development or public policy?  It drives home the message that we must be designing programs, services, and the business environment in a way that is respectful of what has come before, but relevant to what comes next. 

From Beloit’s introduction to the 2014 list:

“They will now be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information and knowledge.”

And:

“A generation accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of scholarship.”

The Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2014

1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive.

2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.

3. “Go West, Young College Grad” has always implied “and don’t stop until you get to Asia…and learn Chinese along the way.”

4. Al Gore has always been animated.

5. Los Angelinos have always been trying to get along.

6. Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-suckers at Hemery High.

7. “Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo.

8. With increasing numbers of ramps, Braille signs, and handicapped parking spaces, the world has always been trying harder to accommodate people with disabilities.

9. Had it remained operational, the villainous computer HAL could be their college classmate this fall, but they have a better chance of running into Miley Cyrus’s folks on Parents’ Weekend.

10. A quarter of the class has at least one immigrant parent, and the immigration debate is not a big priority…unless it involves “real” aliens from another planet.

11. John McEnroe has never played professional tennis.

12. Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.

13. Parents and teachers feared that Beavis and Butt-head might be the voice of a lost generation.

14. Doctor Kevorkian has never been licensed to practice medicine.

15. Colorful lapel ribbons have always been worn to indicate support for a cause.

16. Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways.

17. Trading Chocolate the Moose for Patti the Platypus helped build their Beanie Baby collection.

18. Fergie is a pop singer, not a princess.

19. They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.

20. DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed.

21. Woody Allen, whose heart has wanted what it wanted, has always been with Soon-Yi Previn.

22. Cross-burning has always been deemed protected speech.

23. Leasing has always allowed the folks to upgrade their tastes in cars.

24. “Cop Killer” by rapper Ice-T has never been available on a recording.

25. Leno and Letterman have always been trading insults on opposing networks.

26. Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides.

27. Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive.

28. They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.

29. Reggie Jackson has always been enshrined in Cooperstown.

30. “Viewer Discretion” has always been an available warning on TV shows.

31. The first computer they probably touched was an Apple II; it is now in a museum.

32. Czechoslovakia has never existed.

33. Second-hand smoke has always been an official carcinogen.

34. “Assisted Living” has always been replacing nursing homes, while Hospice has always been an alternative to hospitals.

35. Once they got through security, going to the airport has always resembled going to the mall.

36. Adhesive strips have always been available in varying skin tones.

37. Whatever their parents may have thought about the year they were born, Queen Elizabeth declared it an “Annus Horribilis.”

38. Bud Selig has always been the Commissioner of Major League Baseball.

39. Pizza jockeys from Domino’s have never killed themselves to get your pizza there in under 30 minutes.

40. There have always been HIV positive athletes in the Olympics.

41. American companies have always done business in Vietnam.

42. Potato has always ended in an “e” in New Jersey per vice presidential edict.

43. Russians and Americans have always been living together in space.

44. The dominance of television news by the three networks passed while they were still in their cribs.

45. They have always had a chance to do community service with local and federal programs to earn money for college.

46. Nirvana is on the classic oldies station.

47. Children have always been trying to divorce their parents.

48. Someone has always gotten married in space.

49. While they were babbling in strollers, there was already a female Poet Laureate of the United States.

50. Toothpaste tubes have always stood up on their caps.

51.  Food has always been irradiated.

52. There have always been women priests in the Anglican Church.

53. J.R. Ewing has always been dead and gone. Hasn’t he? 

54. The historic bridge at Mostar in Bosnia has always been a copy.

55. Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties.

56. They may have assumed that parents’ complaints about Black Monday had to do with punk rockers from L.A., not Wall Street.

57. A purple dinosaur has always supplanted Barney Google and Barney Fife. 

58. Beethoven has always been a dog.

59. By the time their folks might have noticed Coca Cola’s new Tab Clear, it was gone.

60. Walmart has never sold handguns over the counter in the lower 48.

61. Presidential appointees have always been required to be more precise about paying their nannies’ withholding tax, or else.

62. Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch has always been routine. 

63. Their parents’ favorite TV sitcoms have always been showing up as movies.

64. The U.S, Canada, and Mexico have always agreed to trade freely.

65. They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus.

66. Galileo is forgiven and welcome back into the Roman Catholic Church.

67. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has always sat on the Supreme Court.

68. They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S.

69. The Post Office has always been going broke.

70. The artist formerly known as Snoop Doggy Dogg has always been rapping.

71. The nation has never approved of the job Congress is doing.

72. One way or another, “It’s the economy, stupid” and always has been.

73. Silicone-gel breast implants have always been regulated.

74. They’ve always been able to blast off with the Sci-Fi Channel.

75. Honda has always been a major competitor on Memorial Day at Indianapolis.

Industry Week has a blurb about a new partnership between Ford and TechShop.

TechShop is a membership-based workshop (originally in the San Francisco area) which provides access to specialized (read: Highly expensive) tools to inventors and do-it-yourself-ers like CNC machines, lathes, and precision plasma cutters.  TechShop is opening a facility in the Detroit area focused on automotive industry innovation.  The Big Blue Oval is signing on as a sponsor of a new location in Michigan– with the obvious benefit that it will have access (and cache) with inventors pushing the “bleeding edge” of development.  Ford has shown a recent ability to adapt and innovate, and this partnership seems to follow the storyline that the company is open to new ideas, and to taking input from external sources.

While TechShop is itself an interesting example of a business finding an un-filled niche, this is also a really interesting use of “crowdsourcing,” and holds great potential for growing local businesses in an area suffering from near-catastrophic decline.

Not sure how I missed this, but back in February the NYT provided a fantastic interactive graphic (screen shot below) showing how the proposed FY2011 Federal Budget shakes out. The rectangles in the chart show the relative size of spending for that particular category, the color indicates a percentage change from the previous year’s budget, and you can click on a smaller section to zoom in for details.

The Times continues to provide truly impressive data visualization, and this chart packs a huge amount of information into a relatively simple-to-grasp format.

Bonus Exercise 1:  Select the “Hide Mandatory Spending” option from the blue buttons at the top of the graphic.  This eliminates the entitlement programs, debt service, and the like, and leaves the “discretionary” portion of the budget visible.  There is a shocking amount of white space when you select that option. 

Bonus Exercise 2:  Let’s say you were interested in finding Small & Minority Business Assistance on this chart…  You would have to use the zoom functions, and look carefully…waaaaay over here:

The NYT has an interesting article up discussing a new study, out this week, presenting the findings of research on the long-term earnings prospects of students vis-à-vis their participation in early-childhood educational programs.  Previous studies have focused on the relative effects using test scores, and showed little long-term gains into high school using that metric, as the effects seem to fade out over time.

From the text:

“Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

“All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.”

I am fortunate to know  a few people (and managed to marry one) who make foundational, beneficial impacts on children, and who would definitely agree that the real measure of a teacher’s success can’t be captured solely by test scores – a major hurdle for real “Pay for Performance” initiatives, and cause for countless debates over how to measure teaching efficacy.  At least in this case, the researchers are pointing the way to adult outcomes that have real meaning and economic impact:  earnings potential.

The study findings are here.

Re-posted from AmEx's OPEN Forum -- Original Link HERE

Jul 08, 2010 -

Anyone who's ever had to form a company can sympathize with how difficult it can be to create a company name that is descriptive yet unique. 

However, some companies have gone a less-traditional route and used some pretty unique naming conventions. 

Here are some examples of interesting company names and the backstories behind them.

1. Google

The name started as a joke about the amount of information the search engine could search, or a "Googol" of information. (A googol is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.) When founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin gave a presentation to an angel investor, they received a check made out to "Google."

2. Hotmail

Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith had the idea of checking their email via a web interface, and tried to find a name that ended in "mail." They finally settled on hotmail because it had the letters "html," referencing the HTML programming language used to help create the product.

3. Volkswagen

Volkswagen literally means "people's car." Adolf Hitler initially came up with the idea for "cars for the masses," which would be a state-sponsored "Volkswagen" program. Hitler wanted to create a more affordable car that was able to transport two adults and three children at speeds of 62 mph. He choose the car manufacturer Porsche to carry out the project, and the rest, as they say, is history.

4. Yahoo

The word "yahoo" was coined by Jonathan Swift in the the book Gulliver's Travels. The term represented a repulsive, filthy creatures that resembled humans (think: Neanderthal). Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo considered themselves yahoos, and thought the term would be appropriate for their joint venture.

5. Asus

The consumer electronic company is named after Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology. The founders dropped the first three letters for the high position in alphabetical listings. In 1998 Asus created a spinoff company named Pegatron, using the other unused letters of Pegasus.

6. Cisco

Contrary to popular belief and theories, Cisco is simply short for San Francisco. Their logo resembles the suspension cables found on the Golden Gate bridge.

7. Canon

When Canon was founded in 1933 under the name Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory. Two years later they adopted "Canon" after the company's first camera, the Kwanon. Kwanon is the Japanese name of the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy.

8. Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola's name comes from the the coca leaves and kola nuts used as flavoring in the soft drink. Eventually Coca-Cola creator John S. Pemberton changed the 'K' of kola to 'C' to create a more fluid name.

9. FranklinCovey

The planning product line was named after Benjamin Franklin and Stephen Covey. The company was formed in 1997 from the combining of the two companies FranklinQuest and the Covey Leadership Center.

10. IKEA

IKEA is simply a random collection of letters, based from the first letters of founder Ingvar Kamprad's name in addition to the first letters of the names of the Swedish property and the village in which he grew up: Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd.

11. Lego

Lego is a combination of the Danish phrase "leg godt," which translates to "play well." Initially the company built wooden toys, and later switched to making plastic bricks. Lego also means "I put together" in Latin, but the Lego Group claims this merely coincidence and the origin of the word is strictly Danish.

12. Reebok

Reebok is simply an alternate spelling of "rhebok," an African antelope. The company founders found the word in a South African edition of a dictionary won by the Joe Foster, son of the Reebok founder J.W. Foster.

13. Sharp

The Japanese consumer electronics company is named after its first product, an ever-sharp pencil that was created in 1915.

14. Six Apart

Six Apart's name has one of the most interesting origins. The web company's co-founders Ben and Mena Trott were born six days apart.

15. Skype

The original prototype of the company's flagship product had the name "Sky-Peer-to-Peer," which was shrunk down to Skyper, then finally Skype.

16. Verizon

Verizon is a combination of the words veritas, which is Latin for "truth," and horizon.

The world isn’t that big of a place anymore.  In economic development circles, you often hear about competing in the world marketplace, and the pressures that communities and regions face to develop capacities to think and act globally.  New Scientist published a set of maps and charts in 2009 that demonstrate just how connected we really are.  To begin, here’s a heat map showing the travel times (by land transportation) to major population centers, and the darker the color, the more remote the area.  The remainder of the charts show road, rail, water, and travel time information, presented in graphical form. 

BONUS:  Google Docs has a Heat Map gadget!

In a previous post, I discussed a study linking job creation to “young” firms.

Now, the Kauffman Foundation has issued an update on entrepreneurship for 2009: their excellent Index of Entrepreneurial Activity.  Surprisingly, the index shows that 2009 yielded a larger number of business startups than either of the previous two years, and ranked Oklahoma and Montana as the states with the highest rates of entrepreneurial activity, followed by Arizona, Texas, and Idaho.  Further, 2009 had the highest rates of activity in the last 14 years.  So – when larger firms and established industries are shedding jobs, perhaps there are fewer obstructions to people striking out on their own.  This seems to bode well for our future – if we can connect these entrepreneurs with the support and environment they need for their businesses to reach maturity.

The study is HERE.

The US Census Bureau is in the midst of collecting mail-in forms for the 2010 decennial census.  If you haven’t filled out your form – do so today and get it in the mail!  The Census provides valuable information on community demographics, trends and patterns, and areas of focus for services and development.  Our country has conducted a census every ten years since 1790.

The Census Bureau reports that the current participation rate for the mail-in portion of the effort is 34%. 

For every 1% increase in mail participation, the Bureau will save $85,000,000 of taxpayer funds required to field census-takers on the street. (source)

The Bureau provides an interactive mapping tool where you can see response rates from a national level:

You can use this map to drill down further to a local level:

Economic development (and representative government) lives and dies by the quality of the data used to derive decisions and set priorities.  The Census is the cornerstone of our country’s attempt to understand who is here, where people live, and the general make-up of our nation.  Participate!

Last November, The Kauffman Foundation issued a great report entitled “Where Will the Jobs Come From.”  In a novel approach to reviewing job creation data, the researchers (Dane Stangler and Robert Litan) examined the data looking for firm age, rather than size, and emphasized job creation rather than current employment.  In their words: “Let’s not ask where people work, but where each additional increment in net job creation occurs” (pg 4).  They’re using Census Bureau data, so of course, there is some latency in the information.  The study’s research data focused on 2007.  Several interesting points worth noting:

“…without startups, net job creation for the American economy would be negative in all but a handful of years.”  (pg 5)

Given that roughly half of start-up companies fail, the authors posit that some number of those gains are included in subsequent years’ losses.  But they’re more interested in the 50% of start-up companies that survive from year 1 to year 5:

“[in 2007] young companies, those aged one to five, had been the most dynamic in adding new jobs to the economy.  OF the entire pool of new jobs added in 2007, about two-thirds was generated by these young companies.” (pg 6).

So what?  The authors put their most important point in large-font, bold type, so I will too:

ENTREPRENEURS = RECOVERY