The Cleveland Institute of Art's vision for strengthening NEO Design is an encouraging development. In the tradition of Hugh Greenlee and Victor Schreckenghost - honored seatholders in the Pantheon of Cleveland designers - the region's design center credentials are getting burnished.

At Wednesday's Community of Minds program, the CIA's Jergen Faust, foreshadowed new collaborations between the CIA and NEO organizations - both for profit and not-for-profit. Its signifigance can hardly be overstated: It signals that NEO's stock of intellectual property is on the rise and this will attract and retain designers and others in the chain of supply.

Faust's comments were made, appropriately, at the Dively Center of the Weatherhead School of Management. The facility on the Case campus, is named for George Dively, its benefactor and one-time chairman of Cleveland-based Harris-Intertype Corporation. It championed great design of printing presses for newspapers and the graphic arts, and Cleveland was a center of the once dominant industry, one that has been eclipsed by innovation.

Faust's comments were made in the context of the CIA's inauguration, in September 2005, of an advanced degree program in internet design. The irony is that Harris Corporation relocated its headquarters to Florida, a generation ago, and today the company is a leader in its industry segment of the electronics.industry.