Inventing the next American (and SW Florida) economy

Last week, Xavier de Souza Briggs, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's School of Architecture + Planning, delivered a speech in Chicago called “Inventing the Next American Economy.” The lessons in the speech came in two doses: (1) a take-down of what we are doing wrong and (2) how to respond to the economic opportunity in a fast-changing world.Thankfully, de Souza Briggs has made his presentation available online. No matter where you stand politically, economically or geographically, the material will challenge a lot of assumptions about what's driving local economies.

There is a lot going on here. Some of the takeaways for Southwest Florida are:

• Abandon the old ways of business, especially the race to the bottom on cheap costs and failing to understand where new jobs come from.
• The most important exercise is focusing on the 10 percent of high growth and output industries that will generate 45 percent of activity. This is how service jobs get better.
• Planning is not so much an exercise in land use, but in constant adaptation.
• Communities (and regions) need to identify assets. These are not the pillars (which tend to look backward), but assets needed to adapt.

This new framing poses a couple of questions for our region:

• Why are local leaders still stuck on creating a cheap business climate with outdated placemaking?
• What would the Sarasota 2050 plan or the new codes downtown look like if the focus were on strategic adaptation instead of recycled arguments from the 1980s on growth versus no-growth?
• Does the region really know where the jobs and money flow are coming from? Southwest Florida attracts a lot of retirees who never join the traditional economic and business groups. Are local leaders investigating unlikely connector spaces such as Starbucks and community houses in homeowners' associations?
• How do we identify key trading partners? It seems like investigating supply chains and markets á la 1980 still has relevance, but 3-D printing, mobile computing, the coming disruption in education and health care, question marks about federal funding and other big-picture changes mean something.

It all seems to start with knowing your strengths and mapping their evolution. For example, bright people are beginning to exploit sports tourism, which is an offshoot of tourism. While there are a lot of activities like golf, Masters Swimming and the annual Ultimate Frisbee tournament, rowing brought new attention and a new trajectory to this asset. The trick to a "next economy" is staking out what's next. What if sports tourism writ large were paired with health disruptors from San Jose looking to monetize preventative health care?