Rick Smyre

Senior Economic Development Analyst

Rick Smyre brings a wealth of business and community development experience to Design Nine. Smyre is a nationally recognized futurist specializing in the area of building "capacities for transformation" in local communities. He is the architect of the new field of "process leadership.” Mr. Smyre is the past Chairman of the Board of the American Association of Retirement Communities and is on the staff of the National Economic Development Institute. In the '70s he was the CEO of a textile yarn spinning firm. As a result of his experience at the local level, to include Chairman of a NC school board, he understands the difficulty of helping people prepare for a different kind of society.

Mr. Smyre has concentrated on developing innovative concepts, methods, and techniques in collaboration with a self-organizing network of 1300 individuals in forty + states and six countries. The focus of this work is to develop “capacities for transformation” in the thinking and activities of local communities. In 2000, his essay, Rewiring a Community’s Brain, was published as a chapter in the book Creating Learning Communities. His articles and papers have been published on the Web and his paper, Beyond the Deck Chairs, was published by the World Future Society’s Future Research Quarterly in 1998.

Mr. Smyre has spoken at the last eight World Future Society Conferences, the National Scottish Foundation in Edinburg, Scotland, the National Computer Ethics Conference at the Brookings Institute and a national economic development conference in Toronto. Among the keynotes he has provided are the National Millennium Communities Conference in Houston for the US Institute of Justice; the national Council for Resource Development in Washington, DC; the Southeastern Civil Rights Conference in Atlanta;the Pennsylvania Rural Center State Conference; the North Carolina Community College System; the TVA Quality Communities Conference; the Illinois State Association of Community College Administrators; the Mid West Economic Development Commission Conference in Minnesota; the Institute of the Future Conference in Houston, TX; the GrandNet Conference in Grand Rapids, MI; the North Dakota Industrial Development Association; and the Mississippi-Arkansas Main Street Associations; and the World Trade Center Conference in St. Louis, MO.