Designing your Campus as a Talent Magnet with Strategic Doing

Join us as guest speaker, Ed Morrison, Director at Purdue University, and Hunter Morrison, Senior Fellow in the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University, share their insights.

Scholars often think of universities as “anchor institutions”. That’s the wrong metaphor. Instead, think “talent magnets”. Universities offer remarkable opportunities to attract and retain talent. The critical step involves designing and developing the “shared prosperity zone” around your campus. In this workshop, we will share rules of thumb and a simple development framework to design the critical 1/4 mile zone around your campus. In a workshop exercise, we will show you how you can use Strategic Doing to design a clear process to engage partners and develop a shared prosperity zone around your campus. We will walk you through a process to engage your partners quickly and move toward measurable outcomes.

This engagement discipline of Strategic Doing can be taught and scaled across your campus. To illustrate the concept of a “prosperity zone” we will introduce some case studies: Youngstown State University, Kent State University, and the University of Pennsylvania. To introduce how to think about this prosperity zone in terms of an ecosystem, we will illustrate with the cases of the University of North Alabama and the Charleston Digital Corridor. Finally, we will introduce how your university can join a growing international network of university teaching Strategic Doing, an open source operating system for complex collaborations. Three components to this workshop will make it a unique learning experience: 1) an easy to understand physical development framework (the “university prosperity zone”) ; 2) a model of ecosystem development that is easy to communicate to both university and community leaders (“open economic development”); and 3) an agile process to provide practical answers to moving forward (“Strategic Doing”). Using this process, participants will walk away with a practical approach for engaging their partners to move forward.