Grow Cedar Valley and Red Cedar Partner to Bring Innovation into Business Retention & Expansion

posted on Tuesday, April 20, 2021 in Economic Development

Danny Laudick, Executive Director of Red Cedar, shares, "We increasingly live in a world where economic prosperity depends ever more on the quality of ideas and talent and less on traditional infrastructure. Innovation, or our ability to generate and apply new knowledge, is becoming faster, more multidisciplinary, more collaborative, and more global than any time before. But, paradoxically, even as innovation has globalized, the role of regions as the critical nexus for innovation-based economic growth has increased.

Even in today’s knowledge-based economy, innovation remains a 'contact sport' that works best through personal interactions, and innovation hot spots still emerge regionally.  Only a handful of areas have developed the platform to support innovation-based growth, but every region in the country has the capacity to become an innovation hub – at least in some industries."

Grow Cedar Valley’s role, with the collaboration of Red Cedar, is identifying and prioritizing the underlying regional assets, networks, culture, and community support necessary for business innovation to thrive, providing support to see the longer-term objectives through.

Danny Laudick, Executive Director of Red Cedar is working with Lisa Skubal to have these discussions with existing and emerging business leaders, leaning on their insight to provide context to the question of “what would it look like for the Cedar Valley to be a hub of innovation in the 21st-century economy?”. 

“We have some of the brightest, most capable, and creative people in the county here, and we can accomplish anything we want to over the next 15, 20 years…the question is what do we want to accomplish?” Danny shares.