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It was encouraging to read the Q&A with Commerce Secretary David Adams in the IBJ. Previous administrations have understood the importance of talent development, retraining and attraction, but with the departmental reorganization, expectations are higher for Adams, and he seems ready for the challenge.
Three of the most important questions he posed in the conversation are related to home, hope and help.
From Adams: “Our pivot is going to be much more focused on inside the four walls of Indiana in terms of, how do we help the existing businesses here, and again, on a regional basis, and how do we on a regional basis understand what’s genuine and authentic to them?”
This at-home approach underscores a key understanding: To best support sustainable businesses that create great jobs requires local knowledge. Beyond the questions to ask, hopefully regional leaders will be given a degree of autonomy to address the answers in creative and adaptive ways. An idea to consider is to foster healthy competition for resources based on performance metrics so these leaders go beyond simple bureaucratic execution.
He goes on to identify that, “Part of the challenge is, how do you create the opportunities for individuals in your state so that they can see that they have a future?”
This is fundamentally a challenge of hope. Especially pronounced in rural and urban areas of the state, hopelessness—while linked to joblessness—goes deeper. As many areas have been left behind in the post-industrial globalized economy, decline of civil society has followed.
As I noted in my column from September 2023 headlined “Civic opportunities are plentiful all around”: “Hope is the belief that, if we work hard enough together, we can make things better.”
The first movers in hope development often start from a place of love. People with topophilia—a love of place—often move back to their hometowns and are willing to make investments with longer apertures of time because their vision goes beyond market-rate returns.
There are bold individuals around the state, like Neil Mylet, who are sowing seeds of hope in frontier markets. Mylet is renovating an 18,000-square-foot former opera house in his hometown of Camden, into a technology hub and coworking space. And in Union City, Mayor Chad Spence has helped coordinate the revitalization of a decaying building into what is called Vision Corner Learning Center.
Regional leaders can identify, elevate and share these stories and find creative ways to reduce friction and put tailwinds behind these innovative men and women.
Adams also highlighted an effort to “get out and talk to small-business owners, midsized business owners and entrepreneurs who want to actually get into that space. How do we help them?”
How to help can be counterintuitive when it comes to entrepreneurship and SMB. While access to capital and workforce are challenges, the government’s role in helping can quickly hit a point of diminishing returns.
Entrepreneurs are adaptive and resilient. The main thing they need are clear and consistent rules to play by that don’t punish success. But with macro chaos and instability from the Trump administration, with actions like on-and-off tariffs, many businesses have been hesitant to move on important decisions. Helping in the short run might look like fewer new programs and resources, and more like a Hippocratic oath applied to business: First, do no harm.
As it appears likely that House Bill 1172 will pass, creating the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Adams’ first effort of talent attraction will be finding a leader who understands the helpful but limited role government can play in fostering growth in those critical areas.•
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Schutt is co-founder of Homesense Heating & Cooling and Refinery46 and an American Enterprise Institute civic renewal fellow. Send comments to [email protected].
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