Why is GCP hooked on gambling?

At a time when our business leaders in Cleveland are pursuing gambling [1], business leaders in Milwaukee, St. Louis and Indianapolis have their priorities straight: They are focused on innovation.

Read more about Milwaukee here [2] and here [3].

Read more about St. Louis here [4].

Read more about Indianapolis here [5] and here [6].

(Next week, Leadership Indiana, an initiative that I guide, will be holding its statewide summit on The Urgency of Innovation. Jack Ricchiuto and June Holley will be conducting workshops on how open networks accelerate innovation. Cummins' CEO Tim Solso will share the impressive story about how his company is adjusting to the pressures of globalization. We will also have workshops that explore innovation in health care, finance, and K-12 education.)

To understand more about why innovation matters, visit this web site [7].

Urban casinos are not the answer to the challenges we face with globalization. Within a five years or so, the Chinese will be exporting high quality, low cost cars to the U.S. in volume. Read more [8].

This trend places Lordstown in the cross-hairs and raises some powerful new challenges to Ford's Ohio facilities. Read more [9].

At the same time, new opportunities are starting to slip by...We are slow to move on alternative fuels. See, for example, the new clean energy cluster that formed last week in Northern Colorado. Read more [10].

In Michigan, the state recently landed two prize $15 million grants to experiment with workforce innovation and regional economic development. (Pennsylvania got one, and so did Indiana, but Ohio did not.) These grants are closely tied to the importance of accelerating innovation. Read more [11].

Or, consider the fact that over a year ago Pennsylvania landed Europe's largest wind turbine producer. Read more [12].

Or, that by the end of this year, Indiana will have constructed close to fifteen biofuels plants in two years. Learn more about their innovative BioTown initiative. Read more [13].

As I look over our landscape of opportunities in Northeast Ohio, it's sad to see that gambling -- a twenty year old economic development strategy that doesn't work very well and carries serious social costs [14] -- has made it to the top of the GCP agenda. But that’s what happens when real estate interests dominate a chamber of commerce. Thinking becomes deal driven, short term, and focused on “build it and they will come" projects, like casinos and convention centers.