Youngstown’s role not only in the economic revitalization of Northeast Ohio but also in the establishment of the “Cleveburgh” Corridor continues to grow.  From Jim Cossler:

We are extremely pleased to announce that Humility of Mary Health Partners (HMHP) has agreed to serve as the Beta site for erisRx, a .NET suite of charge capture tools developed by YBI portfolio company Eris Medical Technologies. HMHP is a region of Catholic Healthcare Partners, the largest health system in Ohio and the seventh largest not-for-profit health system in the United States.

The software provides healthcare revenue management teams, clinical staff, and hospital administration with an automated tool to review patient charges both prospectively and retrospectively, prioritize and trend charge capture opportunities, and more effectively manage the hospital patient charge capture process.

To learn more about this exciting new technology that allows hospitals and practices to pin point missing revenue opportunities, visit Eris Medical Technologies at www.erismed.com

Jim

Jim Cossler
Chief Evangelist
Youngstown Business Incubator
330.884.6262
www.ybi.org

From CNN/Money:

Whilst the energy grids we rely on to provide us with cheap and reliable electricity may have been fit for purpose in the 20th century, it is now abundantly clear that the design of 21st century energy networks will have to be very different. In Europe, the foundations for a secure, flexible and more energy efficient future are already being laid.

The SmartGrids project will transform how electricity is supplied in Europe. Instead of centralized power generation, new suppliers will be linked up providing new trading opportunities for businesses and homeowners.

Traditional carbon-based power generators are far from efficient. They waste well over half their energy in heat and contribute over a third to total greenhouse emissions. It is now widely accepted that continuing to rely so heavily on such polluting systems would not only spark environmental catastrophe but also economic collapse.

With an aging electricity grid, a drive to lower carbon emissions by 2020 and burgeoning new markets in renewable energy, the time was right for Europe’s leaders to set about trying to find another way.

The result is SmartGrids — one of many projects set up under the European Union’s European Technology Platform (ETP). Combining the expertise of industry, NGO’s, scientists and regulators, SmartGrids is proposing a fundamental shift away from traditional energy supply models.

Go here for the rest of this report.

The connections between advanced energy technologies and IT have never been more important.  Most of the attention today is focused on generating of new sources of energy or reducing consumption.  Both are important, but ignore the critical third element: transmission.  From Fortune Magazine:

The electric industry has been talking for decades about bringing the nation’s antiquated, inefficient, glitch-prone energy grid into the Computer Age. Now, with energy demand rising twice as fast as supply, it’s finally happening, thanks to a rare alignment of interests - government, business, consumer, and environmental.

Government and industry studies estimate that a modern digital energy grid could trim the country’s power usage by 10%, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25%, and eliminate the need for $80 billion in new power plants. “It’s not a question of whether such a grid can be built,” says Rick Nicholson, an energy analyst at the market research firm IDC, “but when.”

Get the rest of the story here.

From the Columbus Dispatch via Crain’s Cleveland Business:

As the Ohio economy continues to shed jobs overall, employment in the state’s high-tech sector grew in 2006, for the second consecutive year, according to a new report.

Ohio added 2,800 tech jobs that year, an increase over the previous year’s 1,200, based on statistics from AeA, a national nonprofit tech-industry organization.

2007 numbers are expected to be even higher, based on venture-capital investments that tripled to more than $170 million compared with the year before, said Ed Longanecker, executive director of the AeA Midwest Council.

 Get the rest of the story here.

My thanks to Jim Russell over at Burgh Diasporah for turning me on to Richard Longworth’s new book, Caught In The Middle.  While I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing yet, I did take the shortcut through the index to find out what Longworth had to say about Cleveland. 

A couple of excerpts should whet your appetite for what appears to be an extremely trenchant assessment of our region’s struggle to regain its footing in the age of globalism: 

“A century ago, Cleveland was one of the three or four richest cities in America, the home of the Rockefellers, an industrial powerhouse….Euclid Avenue once ranked with Fifth Avenue in New York as the most elegant street in the country: when the Rockefellers and the Hannas lived there, it was known as Millionaire’s Row.  Cleveland used to be the fifth-biggest American city; now it’s thirty ninth….

“What happened? ‘We stopped innovating,’ Ronn Richard, the president of The Cleveland Foundation told me. ‘We missed the IT revolution.  We missed it because we were so fat, dumb and happy with our prowess in heavy manufacturing.’ …

Longworth continues: “In all my travels through the Midwest, Cleveland was the only place, big or small, that seemed heedless of the global challenge.  Only 4 percent of its population is foreign-born, in an era that demands new blood; the city government isn’t sure it wants more.  One of its leading economists told me, ‘You can’t kill manufacturing–that’s stupid,’ but manufacturing is fleeing and cities need new ways to support themselves.  In an era of global connectivity, only one non-stop per day, to England, links Cleveland to the world.  The first-rate Cleveland Clinic is expanding, but every Midwestern city is building up its health industry: few expect it to carry the city’s economy.”

And that, dear readers, is just the tip of the iceberg. 

 Of course it isn’t all doom and gloom, but it does highlight a key missing element in our economic development efforts: no matter how much money and effort we pour into healthcare, IT, advanced energy, materials and new approaches to manufacturing–all necessary but none sufficient components for success–so long as we ignore the need to attract more immigrants to the region (does the name Richard Herman ring a bell anyone?), so long as we try to shut out the realities of what it means to be a player in the *global* marketplace, we will always find ourselves caught in the middle and just muddling through.

You get more companies that eventually will be ready for VC funding.  From Jim Cossler:

Our ever growing managed cluster of B2B software application companies in Downtown Youngstown grew a bit more with the approval Visual Impact Imaging and Eris Medical Technologies as new tenants.Visual Impact Imaging www.visualimpactimaging.com provides high quality design software and other technical tools to the landscaping industry throughout North America.  Eris Medical Technologies www.erismed.com has developed software that is focused on identifying, benchmarking, correcting and tracking outpatient hospital and clinic missing revenue and charge capture opportunities.  Both firms will be moving into the Youngstown Business Incubator (YBI) in about one month when YBI’s new Taft Technology Center and renovated Semple Building open.  Nine additional software companies are expected to follow within the next twelve months.

Yup. A three building campus loaded with world class software companies globally doing business from Downtown Youngstown.

Yes we can!

Jim Cossler
Chief Evangelist
Youngstown Business Incubator
330.884.6262
www.ybi.org
www.myspace.com/ytownbusinessincubator

As reported in Crain’s:

 A Florida medical imaging company has committed to move to Northeast Ohio to take advantage of government financial incentives and the region’s health care resources.

ViewRay Inc. of Gainesville, Fla., plans to move to the area as soon as it finds a location, said CEO William Wells. He said the company is particularly interested in Solon.

The company holds an exclusive license to University of Florida technology that uses magnetic resonance imaging to guide radiation therapy used in treating cancer.

Click here to read the full story.

In an earlier post I paid homage to Jim Russell over at Burgh Diaspora.  I sent him an email heads up, and when I didn’t hear back from him right away I’ll admit I got a little worried.  Turns out Jim was otherwise occupied with becoming a new father–so congrats, Jim!

And yet Jim still found the time to post about OSTN as an opportunity to call upon the diaspora, and in the process brought the Steeltown Entertainment Project to my attention.

The “Cleveburgh” concept–the notion that Pittsburgh and Cleveland have both similar and comlementary assets and that the two cities and their surrounding regions should start thinking of themselves as one collective region–is a powerful one that has supporters in advanced energy, green building, and information and communications technologies.  Certainly Jim Cossler at the Youngstown Business Incubator understands the need for regionalism to cross state borders.  And for those of us who consider media a part of the information and communications industry, the OSTN Film Festival could provide yet another catalyst for more regional cooperation.  Jim Russell at Burg Diaspora certainly thinks so:

“Northeast Ohio’s close proximity to Pittsburgh could have a few beneficial spillover effects, for both regions. More importantly, the efforts in one Rust Belt city can help inform similar projects in another shrinking city. That’s one of the ideas driving GLUE. And who knows, perhaps two Rust Belt bloggers can foster a meaningful connection between Arun Kumar and Carl Kurlander?”

Read all of Jim’s post here.  And send him your congratulations as well on becoming a new father!

Of course, the media coverage focuses on Google more than on the Clinic, but the story is a direct outcome of the early recognition in this region that electronic medical records are coming and worthy of our attention as an economic development opportunity.  From CNNMoney:

“Google Inc. will begin storing the medical records of a few thousand people as it tests a long-awaited health service that’s likely to raise more concerns about the volume of sensitive information entrusted to the Internet search leader.

“The pilot project to be announced Thursday will involve 1,500 to 10,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic who volunteered to an electronic transfer of their personal health records so they can be retrieved through Google’s new service, which won’t be open to the general public.

“Each health profile, including information about prescriptions, allergies and medical histories, will be protected by a password that’s also required to use other Google services such as e-mail and personalized search tools.”

Click here for the rest of the story.

What will a new presidential administration mean for NASA and the space program?  More parochially, what will the impact be on NASA Glenn Research Center?

www.SpaceRef.com reports that “Some of the most influential leaders of the space community are quietly working to offer the next U.S. president an alternative to President Bush’s ‘vision for space exploration’–one that would delete a lunar base and move instead toward manned missions to asteroids along with a renewed emphasis on Earth environmental spacecraft…

“There would be some different ‘winners and losers’ compared with the Bush vision. If the lunar base is deleted, the Kennedy Space Center could lose additional personnel because there would be fewer Ares V launches and no lunar base infrastructure work that had been assigned to KSC. On the other hand, the Goddard Space Flight Center and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration near Washington, along with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, would gain with the increased space environmental-monitoring goal.”

NASA Glenn does have a role in the current Bush vision, but the Center’s history has focused on aeronautics, “spaceflight systems, propulsion, power, communication, microgravity science and human research.”  The Center has also played a pivotal role in the development of fuel cells and in icing studies.  A shift in focus away from the current vision will inevitably impact NASA Glenn–the question is, how can we best adapt to that shift outside the NASA gates? 

A renewed emphasis on space-environmental monitoring could open up new opportunities for NASA Glenn to interact more closely with community efforts to develop a sustainability roadmap, establish a fresh water institute, and other environmental R&D and technology development efforts.

It’s far too early to say with any certainty–the election is still months away–but clearly there will be changes coming down the road (yet again) for NASA Glenn.  Those involved in sustainablity and environmental technology impacts should pay close attention to opportunites  that might emerge for closer ties with NASA in 2009.