RSS
Over three years ago, Reid Conrad and Lee Buck, the founders of Near-Time, Inc. met Ed Morrison, the founder of Strategy-Nets, LLC.
Near Time has developed powerful, interactive platform of Web 2.0 tools to support collaboration among loosely joined people and organizations
Morrison, a former strategy consultant and now economic policy advisor at the Purdue Center for Regional Development, has developed a new approach to strategy in open networks, called Strategic Doing.
Based on insights from open source software development, Strategic Doing enables teams to get complex projects done in an open network. Morrison was looking for a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use Internet platform. Morrison's work focuses on a sophisticated set of collaboration challenges to meet the challenges of building competitive regional economies.
Strategy-Nets will focus on the large, untapped market of federal, state and local government agencies and non-profit organizations. These entities are looking to collaborate with public and private sector partners to accelerate education and workforce transformation and stimulate regional economic development and job creation.
Morrison’s work around Strategic Doing for community action and regional development has laid the groundwork for Strategy-Nets. Government and civic leaders understand the growing importance of collaborating with corporate and non-profit organizations at federal, state and local levels. The melding of Near-Time and Strategic Doing is timely, as organizations realize that traditional strategy approaches are too expensive and slow.
Here are some examples:
Milwaukee 7’s Regional Workforce Alliance and Water Council.-- Seven counties in southeast Wisconsin have come together to form the Milwaukee 7. The region is adopting Strategic Doing to link, leverage and align assets across organizational and political boundaries. The Regional Workforce Alliance fosters this spirit of collaboration as it builds a new talent development infrastructure for the region. The Milwaukee 7 Water Council emerged from this new approach to strategy. Linkages among leaders in workforce development, economic development and business have led to a vibrant, internationally recognized cluster focused on freshwater technology.
Community Renewal International (CRI).-- Traditional approaches to rebuilding inner-city neighborhoods do not work. Community Renewal International has pioneered the development of a new approach, based on open networks, intentional relationships and Strategic Doing. By focusing on reestablishing the critical networks within the neighborhood, CRI has demonstrated dramatic reductions in crime rates and improvements in educational attainment. CRI is expanding its model to embrace sustainable energy technologies, as it rebuilds low income neighborhoods.
North Central Indiana.-- The 14 county region around Purdue University provides a powerful pilot for using Strategic Doing to redesign a regional economic development strategy and promote a new pattern of open innovation. With a $15 million investment by the federal government, the region has generated over fifty new initiatives in four focus areas of education, workforce and economic development. Each of these initiatives includes metrics. They are also replicable, scalable and sustainable. By following the disciplines of Strategic Doing, the administrative overhead to manage these initiatives is remarkably lean. One full time professional is able to track the metrics on each initiative. One professional oversees the metrics on all the initiatives.
Southeast Missouri.-- Regions in Missouri are exploring new approaches to integrating the secondary and post secondary education systems through P-20 councils. Regional leaders in Southeast Missouri used to Strategic Doing to focus their initiatives, which are designed to reduce high school dropout rates and expand the number of young people continuing their education past high school. Strategic Doing provides a simple, easy to understand discipline to manage complex conversations across political and organizational boundaries.
