A Ball State group is working to improve Indiana's quality of life by bringing talented people into cities and working to keep them there.
The Indiana Communities Institute will assist cities by helping them bring in those talented people and find inventive ways to keep them there. Students, faculty and staff will go to places like Columbus, Ind., Shelbyville, Ind., South Bend, Ind., and anywhere people want help to reshape their communities, Dick Heupel, the interim director of ICI, said.
“We find today that the most vibrant places are those with high levels of human capital,” Heupel said. “[This is] typically measured by educational levels, but we also find entrepreneurial activities driving more innovation and business creation.”
There are various components that students and faculty will research to assist cities in their economic development. As Heupel explained in a column in The Muncie Star Press, these components include “issues such as early childhood education, regulations supporting telecommunications deployment, regional development and the role of federal agencies in state and local economic development.”
“We assist cities and towns first by helping them understand the long-term economic and demographic trends,” Heupel said. “Second, we provide them with knowledge and tools to help them direct their futures toward making places people want to live.”
The Indiana economy has been based on industrial equipment since the 20th century, Heupel said. In the 60s, nearly half the state’s population was employed in manufacturing. Today, only 6 percent of Americans are employed in manufacturing, and Indiana is twice as dependent on it as the rest of the country.
“While we continue to produce industrial goods at an ever-increasing rate, we do so with far fewer people who are armed with higher skill levels than in the past,” Heupel said.
Michael Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research, said Indiana’s human capital shortage lies in the fact that the state does not attract enough talented, out-of-state people.
“The bottom-line research finding from the past three decades is that new businesses are good, but the traditional economic development policies we’ve employed aren’t having an effect on new businesses locating to a region,” Hicks said.
The shift toward human capital-based economic strategy is a reaction to the amount of high-quality research on the topic, and 50 years worth of poor outcomes from current measures, Hicks said.
"I think that the Indiana Communities Institute is a stunning example of a university getting out ahead of and setting [a] bold mission for researchers and practitioners to help policymakers change their focus towards something that will make Indiana a better place,” Hicks said.
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