Seminars
Knowledge Economy Roadshow

The Knowledge Economy Roadshow is a highly acclaimed one day workshop that provides community leaders and economic developers with an easy to understand introduction to broadband and technology issues, framed in the context of economic development. The Roadshow helps leaders understand how broadband is creating new business and job opportunities for rural communities and small towns and cities--if the right economic development strategies and investments are pursued.

The workshop has four key areas of focus:

• Why the Knowledge Economy is different from the Manufacturing Economy, and a discussion of new economic development strategies that can be put in place to help localities adapt to the Knowledge Economy.
  
• How and why the Internet and inexpensive information technology have fundamentally changed the way business relocation decisions are made and four inexpensive strategies to make localities more effective in attracting businesses into a region.
  
• How and why the global marketplace have created new pressures on small and medium-sized businesses, and how economic development strategies can be adjusted to create increased growth for these kinds of businesses.
  
• A new organizational approach to managing economic development activities that leverages the new technologies to make the local economic development leaders more effective and more efficient.

Today we face three types of economies in churn…. the last stages of an Industrial Age, the beginnings of a Creative Knowledge Economy, and the weak signals of a networked Web Economy. Consider the following US trends:

• By next year, it is expected that 70% of all households US will have computers.
  
• By the year 2008, speech recognition will be available for all computers.
  
• By the year 2015, direct manufacturing will provide only 4-8% of all jobs.
  
• By the year 2018, it is expected that over 50% of all goods and services will be bought over the Internet.

In a time when many of our traditional ways no longer work and we find change all around us, the most conservative thing we can do to prepare our communities to be vital and sustainable for the future is to adjust our economic development strategies to adapt to the new technology trends.

All of us live in a time of business and cultural transformation unequaled in history. As population, technology, and information explode beyond the ability of present institutions to adapt, we face the need to rethink and retool the underlying assumptions of how we do economic development, how we lead, and especially how we make decisions in our communities.

Call Design Nine to schedule the Roadshow in your region.

Webcast: The seminar has been archived on the Growing Digital site and can be viewed on demand; the morning presentations and the discussions can be viewed individually. Visit the Growing Digital site to watch.