Since Henry Gomez is taking some time off, I thought I might hop over to Youngstown and get a read on what’s happening there. Besides, it gave me a chance to catch up with Jim Cossler and press him for more about how he is able to do the amazing things he does in the Youngstown Business Incubator.

Actually, I’d been invited to hear two speakers, one from the University describing work being done to develop an Advanced Manufacturing Initiative, and the other Congressman Tim Ryan discussing what he sees as the critical issues for the region. Both presentations helped me understand a little bit more about Cossler’s success–there are many, many people in Youngstown who understand what is really important about the newest “new” economy.

In my earlier post on The So-Called Knowledge Economy, I noted that manufacturing is as knowledge-intensive as any other industry and that we aren’t entering a “knowledge” economy so much as an information-based economy, one predicated on the breakthroughs made in information theory by Alan Turing, Norbert Weiner and, most dramatically, Claude Shannon.

So imagine my delight when YSU professor Allen Hunter launched into his presentation on “Research in the YSU Chemistry Department, CyberTechnology, the Third Frontier & Beyond.” Especially when he tied the historical concentration of steel producers in the Youngstown area—something that at first blush doesn’t make geographic sense given the layout of the region—to the even earlier information technology developments in the area related to offset printing in nearby Niles, Ohio. The commercialization of offset printing technology (an information technology) after the Civil War and the relatively complex machinery it demanded made the Youngstown area a hub for people with the knowledge required to solve similarly complex problems in the early days of the steel industry.

Representative Ryan then followed with an exhortation, based in part of some things he had gleaned from Alvin Toffler’s latest book, about our region’s need not simply to emphasize education, but to completely re-invent the way we educate our children, echoing another major point from that same earlier post.

We are all familiar with the fact that our current school calendar is a legacy from the days when we were principally an agricultural economy, and children were needed in the fields during the summer. Ryan—via Toffler—pointed out another intriguing legacy from that system, one that was indeed introduced as an “innovation” around the time we moved to a more factory-based industrial work: the moving of pupils from specialized class (i.e., “task”) to specialized class on a fixed schedule by the use of bells to indicate the end of one period and the beginning of the next. “The educational system was essentially training these students for factory work,” Ryan said, “getting them used to the way they would be working in the factories once they graduated.”

But as we move into an increasingly information-based economy, where the ability to manipulate, move, interpret, mine and exploit information has higher value than the ability to manipulate, move, mine or exploit other resources, this approach to education no longer serves us well. Nor does it provide us with the kind of knowledge we will need to take advantage of the next waves in manufacturing, healthcare, energy production, national defense, and materials, let alone the prepare us adequately to take advantage of the changing nature of organizations and organizational structures that will lead to both increased job and wealth creation.

It’s time for a real change–something the people in Youngstown truly seem to understand.