Quad-States Regional Transformation Highlights Council Regional Asset Mapping Guide

Competing in the global economy requires the creation of regional innovation ecosystems that drive growth and prosperity. The challenge is to optimize the assets of human, capital (institutional and intangible) around innovation for the future of the region.

Many U.S. regions have yet to fully understand the competitive value of their asset base and few have implemented a systematic process to identify their innovation assets or develop strategies to ensure that these assets are sufficiently linked and leveraged. Using the Council on Competitiveness approach, asset mapping is the premiere resource to help regional business and community leaders support innovation-based growth.

From: Illuminate. Asset Mapping Roadmap: At its most basic level, asset mapping provides leaders with an inventory of key resources utilized in development efforts. Comprehensive asset mapping enables deep insights into key networks and cultural attitudes that shape the regional economy, indicates gap areas that require further investment, and shows a baseline by which to judge future progress toward regional prosperity.

A mismatch between strategy and assets can severely diminish the potential impact of regional development. Asset mapping can either plot the foundation for super-charged strategy or enable the realignment of existing efforts. Asset mapping illuminates the gaps, redundancies and inefficiencies to help regions reallocate resources to key outcomes.

The process deepens the understanding of regional institutions of innovation and how they interact. Aggregating knowledge possessed by a few makes it available to others who may conceive of new ways to leverage resources. As a whole, Asset Mapping creates a positive effect of engaging stakeholders regionally and forming a critical mass as a cornerstone for future development efforts.

A Regional Innovation Grant from the U.S. Department of Labor funds the Asset Mapping initiative through the Workforce Investment Board (WIB) of Southwest Missouri in conjunction with WIBs in Southeast Kansas, Northeast Oklahoma, and Northwest Arkansas. The WIBs collaborate with colleges and universities across the region for market research. Committee volunteers facilitate focus groups and surveys of business and community leaders to capture regional insights.

Strategic priorities for the Asset Mapping taskforce:

• Identify and catalog assets relevant to regional development into searchable, online database
• Build collaborative networks by closing gaps and maximizing assets for regional transformation strategies
• Benchmark competitiveness of the region and measure performance of economic development
• Provide market trends and data to support efforts for other committees

For more information contact:
Jasen Jones, Executive Director
WIB of Southwest Missouri
T 417 206 1717, Extension 224
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)