Corridor Business Journal Article

Nearly 350 business and community leaders came out last week to attend The Path to Regional Excellence breakfast at Kirkwood Community College. The keynote speaker, Michael Langley, congratulated the audience for taking the first step by coming together to learn more about what a strong economic region looks like, but emphasized that there is no easy or quick path and that it will take strong leadership to make it happen here.

On this page, we have been very critical of the lack of progress that the Cedar Rapids/Iowa City Corridor has made over the past several years and highlighted specific steps that can be made to get the ball rolling again.

We did want to take time to celebrate a step in the right direction, specifically the collaboration created by the Corridor Business Alliance — a coalition of a dozen organizations with an economic development focus ranging from the Small Business Development Centers to the chambers of commerce to several of the higher education institutions.

This coalition came together earlier this year after investors in the Iowa City Area Development Group (ICAD) expressed an interest in placing more focus on supporting entrepreneurial activities rather than its traditional focus of recruiting and growing interstate-commerce companies.

ICAD could very easily have developed some entrepreneurial-supporting activities itself, but that made little sense because there were several established organizations like the Entrepreneurial Development Center, the Small Business Development Centers and the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center already engaged in these kinds of activities. But ICAD was unsure of who did what and how effective these organizations were.

Several organizations at the center of economic development activities like Kirkwood Community College and Alliant Energy were instrumental in bringing these 12 organizations together as a collective group to work, understand and think in a more collaborative way.

It was not an easy process to bring these groups together with different personalities, budgets and governing structures, but it has helped these organizations understand each other’s goals and will ultimately help the region work more collaboratively to grow our economy.

It also saved money and time on efforts that were already being done elsewhere, but without a common understanding.

This alliance and the lessons it learned should be instructive to the rest of the Corridor. Before creating a new organization or entity, a hard look should be taken to see if the mission is being met by an existing organization.

Just because an organization might not be good at touting its own success, like the Small Business Development Centers for example, doesn’t mean it isn’t effective with its mission.

The organizations which make up the Corridor Business Alliance should be proud of this small step in the right direction. We are.

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