A Response to the Propositions: Innovation & the Rural Village
by Kip Bergstrom, RI Economic Policy Council
When I first became involved with this project my focus was on preserving the forests of the Borderlands. While I think this is still a central goal, it is much more powerful when combined with the idea of re-inventing the villages of these communities, which came up as a key idea from the small groups in the last meeting we had.
The third of the three propositions speaks to this potential. It aspires to preserve the historic form of the village… defined as a dense, mixed-use, mixed-income, distinctive, walk-able place of “human scale”…as well as by the farm and forest lands that surrounds it. A village surrounded by other villages is an urban neighborhood. A village surrounded by low-density residential neighborhoods is a town center. A village, or at least a rural village, is not a village unless it is surrounded by farm and forest.
One of the interesting things that happened when the towns in the Borderlands were expanded to the north and south, beyond those 10 we were initially considering, to the whole rural corridor on the RI/CT border, is that the most populated villages emerge as a necklace around the forest. The earlier definition of the Borderlands did not have this distinct form, which I think is very powerful.
How can this necklace of villages become nodes in a network of innovation? That is the essence of the re-invention notion: embrace the 21st Century, with its promise of collaborative networks of innovators, connected globally via the Internet and broadband communications, but also locally in the nodes of “third places” like a coffee house, pub or restaurant in a village.
We do not have cheap labor, cheap land, cheap energy, abundant natural resources to exploit, or a particularly central location in the global logistics system. We have no choice but to innovate. There is nothing else for us to do. And virtually everything we do now will be done faster by a computer or cheaper in China or India within 20 years. We have about that much time or less to invent a new economy, or else face a precipitous decline in our standard of living.
All evidence indicates that the pace of innovation is increasing in scale and scope. The years ahead will not be marked primarily by a slow, steady stream of sustaining innovation by large, established firms. We should instead expect constant and accelerating disruptive innovation, much of it driven by networks of collaborating firms that create whole new business models, rather than just new products or technologies, as the basis of competitive value. Our state economic development strategy not only acknowledges this future; we aim to help bring it on by making our state, and the eastern CT/Rhode Island/southeastern Massachusetts labor market of which we are part, one of the world’s pre-eminent test beds for business model innovation, leveraging the advantages inherent in our dense, compact geography, our short idea and supply chains, and our multi-dimensional market singularity (Rhode Island is one media market served by one regional airport, one principal healthcare complex, one retail distribution network and one primary cultural hub. How might the Borderlands piggyback on that strategy?
Over time, as collaborative innovation networks proliferate, a significant amount of work is likely to be organized on a project basis, rather than on a permanent basis. The labor force will likewise be globally mobile (both in a physical and virtual sense) and much more of it employed flexibly, on a contract basis, rather than as permanent employees. This will include the top talent, not just low-skilled temps. For many of us, the line between entrepreneur and worker will blur. Business writer Daniel Pink describes this prospect as a new “free-agent” world. Individuals will need to be global and flexible in their skills set to effectively engage emerging networks.
Much of work in the future may be organized the same way people organize themselves today to make movies. There is a core team that produces and directs the effort, assembling the various groups of talent to get the project done. When the movie is completed, the team dissolves and is reassembled in new combinations by other teams of producers and directors. So imagine a world of “production companies” and pools of “contract talent”. Imagine further that some of these “production companies” (for whatever the good or service is, not just a movie) actually have two homes: a winter location (e.g., Florida) and a summer home (e.g., Rhode Island or Connecticut. The villages of the Borderlands have a play in this scenario as both the summer home of some of the “production companies” as well as the “permanent” home of some of the “contract talent”.
One of the essential pieces of infrastructure to play in this game is broadband communications, via cable, DSL, or via the latest WI-FI or WI-MAX technology, which provides broadband wireless access at relatively low cost of tower infrastructure. Rhode Island is in the process of piloting a statewide wireless infrastructure using this new technology. It would probably not be costly to extend this network to encompass the villages of the Borderlands.
The other piece of essential “infrastructure” for Borderlands villages to play in the innovation game is a K-12 education system that produces graduates who are innovation-capable…who can think, not just memorize, who can work in teams, make decisions, take risks, learn something in one setting and apply it to another…all skills that our schools (nationwide, not just in the Borderlands) are doing a poor job of cultivating.
Some of the best work in high school reform is being done by the Big Picture Company, which operates 24 model high schools at sites around the country including six in Providence.
The focus of the Big Picture model is “Learning Through Internship.” Each student, beginning in ninth grade, spends two days a week in an internship with an adult mentor who shares with the student a passion for a particular type of work, igniting a love of learning that will last a lifetime. All the academic work in the other three days of the school week is structured on a project basis around the internship. Every 9 weeks, students defend their project work before a team consisting of their mentor, their advisor (Big Picture’s name for a “teacher”), other Big Picture Company advisors and students, and a parent or guardian. The student is responsible for the development of the internship, with support from his/her advisor.
Placing the primary responsibility for the development of the internship on the student instills the principle that students are responsible for their own learning. Consistency in the application of this principle is one of the reasons why the Big Picture schools graduate students who are self-directed learning machines, the prime talent for an innovation economy. Big Picture students go onto college in higher percentages than their peers and demonstrate an ability to apply knowledge to new situations
This model has been exported from Providence to 24 sites around the country, typically as a public charter school. It could work in the Borderlands.
Some initial thoughts. Look forward to the conversation.