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Center looks to extend its collaborative reach BOWLING GREEN, O.—Bowling Green State University’s Center for Regional Development (CRD) is looking to expand its collaborative
efforts well beyond BGSU and even the northwest Ohio region.
Dr. Michael Carroll, the center’s new director, wants to create a global network of university-based centers with missions
similar to the CRD. The center’s focus is on enhancing community and regional economic development in a 27 county area.
Carroll, also an assistant professor of economics, foresees network members conducting research with real-time, peer review,
using a Web-based communications suite that includes video, audio and messaging. It’s not a done deal yet, but with verbal
commitments received from universities in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, the network may begin with cross
listings on members’ Web sites, he said.
It would be a logical extension of the work of the center, which changed its name in January, from the Center for Policy Analysis
and Public Service, to more accurately reflect what it has always done—community and regional development, said Assistant
Director Robin Weirauch.
In this case, she said, “regional development” means development of, as much as within, regions. The center encourages local
leaders to think about collaborations outside their political subdivisions, and even county boundaries, for the sake of economic
development, she explained.
One way to get local entities thinking regionally is the concept of clusters, defined as geographic concentrations of interconnected
companies and institutions in a particular field.
The idea is cooperation, seeking complementary businesses that will aid development in a larger area and “not just looking
after your own backyard,” Weirauch said. Cluster-based development “can transcend all of that,” she added.
Along with Neil Reid of the University of Toledo, Carroll is directing a cluster project, now in its third year, aimed at
bolstering the greenhouse industry in a five-county area of northwest Ohio. The project advisory board includes greenhouse
and farm market owners, as well as representatives of the Regional Growth Partnership, the Ohio Floriculture Association and
the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. An Ohio State University extension agent and an OSU faculty
member in horticulture and crop science are also among the board members.
“We’re replicating the greenhouse cluster in other areas,” including the automotive, plastics and glass industries, Carroll
noted. “We have a lot more external collaboration now.”
Working with economic development practitioners such as the Regional Growth Partnership, the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority
and a variety of city and county officials, the Carroll/Reid cluster strategy now underpins the region’s overall economic
development efforts.
Carroll, who holds a Ph.D. from Colorado State University, is a former operations manager at one Dayton-based firm and corporate
controller at another. Affiliated with the CRD since coming to Bowling Green in 2001, he became its director in July, replacing
Dr. Beth Walter Honadle.
Following her departure last year, a committee with campus and external representation reviewed the center’s operations and
recommended renewed emphasis on its research function, particularly from an interdisciplinary standpoint.
A member of the Ohio Rural Universities Program that began in 1985, the center had been part of the political science department
until 1999, when it became an independent unit, offering “a natural transition” to an interdisciplinary approach, Weirauch
noted.
Under the Graduate College’s purview since then, the center has worked with many BGSU departments, including, on the greenhouse
project, faculty members from the economics, geography and management departments, Carroll said.
The CRD is currently partnering with other areas on campus as well. In collaboration with the School of Art, the College of
Musical Arts and the Department of Theatre and Film, a study of the arts’ economic impact in northwest Ohio is under way.
It is under consideration as the focus of the center’s annual State of the Region conference next April. Other projects are
teaming the CRD with the Canadian studies program to study Canadian businesses in northwest Ohio, and with the history department’s
policy history program to look at providing institutional memory in the Ohio General Assembly in an era of term limits.
Carroll has successfully participated in such “interdisciplinary and inter-collegiate collaborations” and generated external
funding for them, according to Dr. Heinz Bulmahn, vice provost for research and dean of the Graduate College.
Calling the new director “a role model” for BGSU President Sidney Ribeau’s Scholarship of Engagement initiative, Bulmahn added
that Carroll has been involved in regional economic development issues and “has a clear vision of developing the center in
order to achieve its outreach and research mission.”
(Posted August 18, 2005 )
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