Eyes on the Future Blog

Our Future Looked Us in the Eyes and Demanded Action

Post by Tom Collins

I've taken the weekend to begin digesting our 2008 Eyes on the Future event. With over 1500 people signed up and a large percentage of them actually showing up, many of those who spoke remarked on what an encouraging sign that is about our region's future, despite the obvious and enormous challenges.

We heard powerful messages from state leaders Gov. Patterson and Dennis Mullen, to local leaders Maggie Brooks and Bob Duffy, to an array of business leaders, Dick Kaplan, Lauren Dixon, Robert Offley, Gerald Ostrov, Michael Reed, SBC's Tom Ioele and GRE's Mark Peterson, to Drs. Donald Bain and John Martin representing our local colleges and universities, along with numerous attendees who stepped up to the microphones to contribute questions and ideas.

Yet, here's the message I can't get out of my head:

"Make me come home!"

At least that's what I took away from the speech by Jennifer Jones, HF-L, student member of the EOTF Planning Committee. What she actually said was (from my notes), "... everything I want or need can be right here ... and I want to come back after college."

Everyone Benefits from Working Together

Post by Jennifer Jones

During my sophomore year at Honeoye Falls-Lima High School, I had the opportunity to take a Sports and Entertainment Marketing class. After completing that class, I came to realize how interested I was in business and marketing. I took on my first internship with an advertising and marketing firm in the summer of 2007 and grew to love it even more. After being connected to the Eyes on the Future planning group, I have gained more insight on how businesses run and I have had a great experience working with the committee to plan the 2008 Economic Summit.

Rochester in 2020: A suburb of Toronto?

Buffalo State professor Bruce Fisher thinks Upstate NY is in for a bleak future, but that the Rochester area may fare better than most. He advocates regional planning and connecting to a "binational region encompassing Toronto, Buffalo, and Rochester as a potential world powerhouse."

Is his advice sound? Is he right that Rochester is positioned to thrive amid the problems he sees on the horizon? Read his article Predicting 2020 in Upstate NY in Buffalo's Artvoice online edition.

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Welcome Back to the Conversation

Hi, this is Tom Collins from WME Blogs, back again this year to host and moderate the Eyes on the Future Blog. In last year's inaugural EOTF blog post, I started with the stated goals for holding the initial conference: to learn what was working in other regions and how we might apply those lessons here.

This year the goals are more immediate and potentially more beneficial:

What are your favorite Rochester "Hidden Gems"?

One of the topics for tomorrow's Eyes on the Future discussion will be what makes the Rochester region a great place to live, work, and play? Knowing more about our advantages will help us all be better ambassadors for our community.

In that spirit, there's a helpful discussion going on over at the BizStrat blog, where Ellen Wagner has posted a short list of Hidden Gems of Rochester offered by staff members at Business Strategies Magazine. The list has begun to grow, as others leave comments with their own favorites (one person's list ranges from Braddock Bay State Park, to Palmer's Fish Market, to a personal selection of pubs).

You might have noticed this theme on the cover of the Business Strategies June issue. You can find dozens of great choices in the 8-page feature article starting on page 26, as well as many from local business leaders, public officials, columnists, and others, scattered throughout the issue identified with a logo like the one at left.

So as Ellen wrote in her post, "QUICK! Think of a hidden gem!" And then get busy sharing yours – leave a comment here, in the comments on Ellen's post, spread the word with everyone you meet.

What can we learn from Hindsight?

Fellow web media sponsor Lee Drake of OS-Cubed alerted me to a new tool from Trulia they're calling Hindsight, which allows you to zoom to a location and generate a regional map that then displays the sales history of residential properties over time. In the case of Rochester, it goes back to the early 1800s!

Is it more than a cool tech-toy? What could we learn from watching residential development in our area over time? What about comparing the regional growth where our "out of town experts" are coming from? Here are links to the maps of Rochester, Reno/Tahoe, Sugar Land, and St. Lucie.

You can pause the timeline, zoom in to neighborhood levels, and generally have a lot of fun. What else could/should be added to this tool to make it a serious planning device?

The tool was designed by Stamen Design using their Modest Maps built on Microsoft's Virtual Earth platform. For more info visit the Virtual Earth/Live Maps Blog and the Trulia Hindsight Blog.

Questions and ideas from Branding Rochester blog

Our friend and local business woman Donna DeClemente has suggested that the Eyes on the Future community connect with Branding Rochester — another group of Rochester thought leaders working to

get more people actively engaged in thinking about how to make Rochester a better place to live, work and visit and how to better promote Rochester to the world.

The Branding Rochester event was sponsored by the Harvard Business School Club of Rochester and held on May 24, but the discussion continues on the Branding Rochester blog. And there are some tough questions and intriguing ideas being discussed there.

For example, RIT graduate and now Philadelphia resident John Sherlock offers an extended comparison of the problems and efforts in both cities and then asks (and answers) himself:

Okay, smart guy - if you think your ideas are so great, what would you do for Rochester?

The answer is elemental. Water.

Between Lake Ontario, The Genesee River and the Erie Canal, you could make Rochester the Intercoastal Waterway of the north. Your BIG IDEA will be a combination of the Baltimore Inner harbor, combined with the San Antonio Riverwalk and a centerpiece Arts Complex for music, dance and theater designed by the hottest architect in the world — all centered in High Falls. It has to be so ambitious that everyone will be talking about it. It will mean changing the very infrastructure of downtown. And everyone has to buy into it. It would bring shopping, dining and hotels into the city. The rest of the good things (and population) would naturally follow.

And after noting her view of some of our problems, long-time Rochester real estate entrepreneur Judy Columbus suggests two ways to make Rochester a "Destination City":

1. create a National Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame; and
2. develop a World Class Intergenerational Camp.

Are there common threads in these ideas? What can we build on at our Eyes on the Future event? How can the two groups work together? Are there others out there?

Carl Davis asks: Should Higher Education be our Leading Industry?

Here's a great series of questions from Carl Davis of Stellar System Technologies that should help us think about the Rochester area's ability to take a leadership role in several key industries:

Should Higher Education be our leading industry?

The University of Rochester is now our leading employer. The Simon School is a top business school. Rochester Institute of Technology is ranked with the top technological institutes in the country. St. John Fisher College and Nazereth College provide nationally ranked programs and continue to grow in popularity and programs. Monroe Community College provides tremendous support for the requests of area business to train our work force in needed disciplines for both new graduates and those upgrading their skill sets. We even have the beginnings of SUNY with the Brockport campus extension downtown. What a scorecard!

It looks like Rochester would benefit from doing everything it can, certainly in the city (SUNY Rochester?), to encourage significant growth in all of these educational institutions and make higher education a true industry for the area. Other cities have done the same and, while education is not their only industry, it provides significant growth by attracting a constant flow of students. More faculty positions means a better use of the local brain trust as well as an increase in that brain trust (and the tax base). Increased staff positions have the potential to replace the manufacturing jobs lost to more competitive regions.

What will the shakers and movers do to make Rochester an educational mecca thus providing the needed broad spectrum of employment opportunities for our area, not to mention feeding the already voracious appetite of entrepreneurs in the area?

New Technology-based lines of business

Outside the Biosciences and Alternative Energy (ethanol production and wind power generation) industries, what technology-based industries are being encouraged and grown in our area?

Advanced Technology based business development in our area

I applaud the efforts of many rainmakers in our area and highlight the successes by local business and our organizations to bring alternative energy and the biosciences to the forefront. My concern is that these are early stage development efforts in many cases (not all). What is being done to bring these efforts out of incubator/early stage business to provide employment for our well educated and experienced populace?

The ideas and questions Carl poses around making our region an "educational mecca" seem especially useful to me. His partial listing of the outstanding colleges and universities in and around Rochester also raised another question in my mind: how large is the Rochester region for purposes of this discussion? With Brockport in Monroe County and Geneseo and Alfred not far away, might we already have the makings of a SUNY campus in Rochester that could draw on the strengths of these schools and build stronger ties throughout the region? For that matter, would the region benefit from establishing a city campus affiliated with all of the area public and private schools?

Is Greater Rochester like the Reno-Tahoe region?

I wanted to get an idea of who the panelists for Eyes on the Future are and what they can share with us. For no particular reason, I started at the bottom of the link list on the website and found out a little about Ron Weisinger, from the Northern Nevada Development Authority (Reno-Tahoe region), and Mayor David G. Wallace, from Sugar Land, Texas (photo left).

Why Sugar Land? "The economy in Fort Bend County, which includes Sugar Land, is rising at a rate greater than that of the 10 strongest metropolitan economies in the country. The size of the economy, earnings and employment all have grown at a rate much faster than 99 percent of all economies in the country." (SBC press release.)

Here's what Tom Ioele, Past President of the Small Business Council said about Wallace in that release: "Mayor Wallace is a great addition to our panel of economic development officials who will share their experiences and offer ideas on how we can apply some of their winning formulas to grow our economy."

So what do we need to ask Mayor Wallace when we have him here? What "immediate actions and tangible results" can he point us toward?

BTW, according to the Fort Bend Now blog Mayor Wallace also has his own online radio show! Here's a sample from his Inside Story podcast.

And speaking of online ideas, Ron Weisinger's bio includes one very specific initiative from the Reno-Tahoe region that gets me excited:

... the re-working of 18 rural regional web sites including demographic information updated on a daily basis. The web sites will be coordinated and interconnected showing assets of the region and integrated local government, for profit and non-profit relationships. All of this is geared to assist the prospective client from work force to real estate, community content to financial, and all aspects of making it easier for a national site selector or individual client to have the best possible facts and knowledge prior to making a site relocation decision.

In a December 2006 interview, he noted, "Companies don't see county lines. Our success is based on how we connect as a region."

How can we leverage the Web toward presenting our Greater Rochester region as a unified economic whole?

Eyes on the Future interviews on Rochester Speaks

Leaders from both SBC (Tom Ioele, Past President) and GRE (Mark Peterson, Managing Director) were featured in an interview on the popular talk radio show Rochester Speaks.

The show aired on Sunday May 20th at 6:00am on 94.1WZNE, 96.5WCMF, and 98PXY and repeats at 7:00am on WARM101.3. The show will replay on Sunday June 3rd at 7am.

Or, you can listen by clicking the Play Buttons below:

Part 1

MP3 File

Part 2

MP3 File