The Metropolitan Business Planning initiative, co-developed by The Brookings Institution and RW Ventures, continues to generate great interest at the local, state and federal levels. Bob Weissbourd has been presenting the concept and framework to audiences of public policy decision makers, as well as non-profit, civic and private-sector leaders both in the U.S. and abroad. Among the more recent presentations are the two below, prepared for the London School of Economics’ City Reformers Group Workshop and the Brookings-hosted event, “Metropolitan Business Plans: A New Approach to Economic Growth.”
Prepared in partnership with the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program for “Global Metro Summit 2010: Delivering the Next Economy,” this policy brief formally introduces the concept of metropolitan business planning, and describes three pilot projects, in Northeast Ohio, Minneapolis-Saint Paul and the Puget Sound (Seattle) region. Offering a new “metro-economic” policy to complement national macroeconomic policy with a new “metro-economic” policy, the paper lays out the characteristics and drivers of regional economies, how they lend themselves to the discipline of business planning, and the implications for regional economic growth policy as well as a “new federalism.”
This speech and accompanying PowerPoint were delivered by Bob Weissbourd as part of the Portland Plan — Inspiring Community Series. The speech begins to tie together the various pieces of economic development — from neighborhoods to regions, equity to prosperity, human capital to clusters — into a comprehensive, integrated, practical approach to metropolitan economic growth.
This concept paper, reporting on a project collaboratively developed by RW Ventures and O-H Community Partners, offers recommendations for catalyzing the emergence of a large-scale market in building energy efficiency retrofits in the Chicago area. Reflecting input from a diverse group of national experts and market stakeholders, the paper offers a preliminary look at potential market development strategies, including new information and other products and services to reduce transaction costs and enable the market to value the retrofits; institutional models and strategies for implementation; and complementary activities from the civic community and government.
This presentation, prepared for CEOs for Cities’ annual meeting, explores some of the key findings that have emerged from the literature on the role of cities in the national economy and on the drivers of urban economic growth. Based on these findings, we extrapolate seven broad principles for urban policy and suggest several related strategies for city and regional economic development.
These two complementary papers written for the Brookings Institution’s Urban Markets Initiative examine the role of information resources in spurring markets and creating investment strategies to boost urban neighborhoods. The papers offer a framework for market-based community economic development, presenting business-planning tools for inner city communities.
This major study, conducted with Christopher Berry for CEOs for Cities, examines the changing drivers of economic success in American cities and metropolitan areas, and how these affect decision-making for leaders across all sectors. The report illustrates our findings on what is happening in and to cities, what made some cities thrive in the 1990s, and what factors appear to make the critical difference for the future.
In planning its activities for the next decade, Living Cities commissioned RW Ventures and the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program to undertake the design phase for a ten-year project that would invest in information to drive inner-city market investment, asset-building and policy reform. The work presented in this report resulted in the creation of the Urban Markets Initiative.
This paper, co-sponsored by the Brookings Institution and the Financial Services Roundtable, led to the business planning and creation of the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI). Originally housed at Shorebank, CFSI is the authority on consumer financial health, leading a network of committed financial services innovators to build better consumer products and practices.
The attached paper examines recent technological advancements and other profound changes in the financial services industry and identifies how these changes create a prime opportunity for the industry to profitably reach out to lower-income consumers. A range of information, access, policy, and other issues can be addressed to improve market functioning, and help bring lower-income consumers into the economic mainstream. Financial services providers are recognizing the benefits and viability of reaching out to lower-income consumers and are creating new partnerships and new products to respond to their needs. The paper closes with recommendations on how best to address the barriers, accelerate the emerging market response and bring it to scale.
This paper examines how current information, primarily dependent on federal data sources, fails to accurately convey the opportunity in inner-city economies. It then suggests how building business-based data and models can address these information imperfections and help bring new investment to America’s most distressed communities. The paper closes by suggesting ways that private-sector leaders can work with the federal government and community organizations to improve data and market expertise and profitably invest in urban neighborhoods. The work reflected in this paper led to the creation of MetroEdge.
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