Business View Magazine | February 2019

CONNECT @uakron @uakron uakron.edu The University of Akron is about CONNECTIONS to a COMMUNITY , to the CITY and in the WORLD . It’s about making an IMPACT and becoming THE NEXT BIG THING . THAT’S WHAT MAKES US. 155 a newmayor, a new county executive, and new leadership at the Greater Akron Chamber,we seized that opportunity to put together a conversation among the three partners: Do we want to seek a new economic development strategy? The answer was ‘Yes.’Were we willing to give up a few sacred cows in order to get greater impact for our region and our community? And the answer was ‘Yes.’ And that led to a process where we engaged two non-resident fellows at the Brookings Institute in a market analysis and strategy development process to create something new for the City. “The product that we ended up with was pretty tremendous.We surveyed our local economy, put it in context with the national economy, and found that we could not double down on attraction– that’s not going to move the needle for places like Akron.We certainly want to be ready, and we need to be ready for business opportunities that do come along, but it’s a shift to focusing on growing what we have–making sure that the top 25 employers are taken care of, but also going back to the other 100 or 150 middle market firms that are driving the majority of our growth.We weren’t set up to sup- port those companies, and we’re nowworking to completely shift our entities to focus on them. “Additionally,what we found was an incredible eco- nomic disparity along racial lines.The City of Akron has about 31 percent African-American population. And that population has essentially been excluded from economic opportunity, post-recession.We have some of the most challenged racial dispari- ties among the economic indicators of any top 100 metro areas. So, economic inclusion is also going to be a huge focus of the new economic development vision; making sure that there’s a shared prosperity