PROVIDENCE, Jan. 19 – In a skillful slice of the analytical knife, the Brookings Institute begins its $1.4 million competitive strategy report by positioning Rhode Island as being on the cliff of a pivotal moment.

Rhode Island, a small state in large nation in a fiercely competitive world, confronts an “existential” choice about its future, the study said, and then frames that choice with rhetorical flourish.

“Are the state’s business, civic, university, and government leaders prepared to think deeply and act decisively as their predecessors did in order to meet profound uncertainty with innovation and ingenuity?” the reports asks. “Or will they merely make the best of slow decline?”

The choices presented are stark: Innovation and ingenuity, or slow decline.

But wait, there’s more to help push folks to make the right decision: “Fortunately, the moment is propitious for renewal,” the report continues. “The national economic backdrop is at last generally positive. An uptick in state revenues has modestly improved the budget outlook as has a refinancing of state debt. And meanwhile, new leadership in key quarters has created space for a serious reassessment of the state’s economic positioning and route toward improved performance.”

Hold on, the cavalry is coming to the rescue; in this instance, it’s the Governor and her economic posse: “Most notably, the administration of Gov. Gina Raimondo – focused on sparking an Ocean State comeback – has been working closely with the General Assembly to develop more strategic approaches for promoting increased and higher-value growth.”

The report continues: “Last summer, specifically, the Assembly passed and Gov. Raimondo signed a 2015–2016 budget equipped with a number of new incentive programs aimed at spurring growth in a variety of sectors, including in what the Brookings Institution calls high-value ‘advanced industry’ clusters. Though billed as only down-payment on growth the programs represented an important first step toward reorienting a drifting economy.”

What was needed to go further and intervene more decisively, the report continued, was for the state to know more about itself: “A fact-based, third party analysis of the state’s competition position that leads to a compelling strategy and action steps for economic growth.”

[Wouldn’t it have made more sense to start with the fact-based study to determine the best strategies before getting the R.I. General Assembly to make a down-payment on the purchase of new tools?]

The report’s prose is compelling, the choices stark, the fact-based evidence and analysis comprehensive, and the urgency to “act decisively” and “think deeply” was made perfectly clear: Rhode Island must seize the opportunity – the train is leaving the station and everyone needs to get on board.

And yet, the use of a rhetorical device to begin the report, what is known as a false dilemma or false dichotomy – an either-or choice as if there was no other option to consider, made ConvergenceRI wary and hesitant.

Why was there such a need to oversell what appeared to be such good ideas?

Who’s the client?
What ConvergenceRI’s careful reading of the report revealed was that there appeared to be two intertwined parts to the 198-page fact-based, third-party analysis, reflecting the reality that there appeared to be two competing agendas.

One was a fact-based competitive analysis, looking at Rhode Island’s strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, targeting future industry sectors for growth, with specific strategic recommendations, all based upon evidence-based data and research.

The second was an apparent effort to promote the economic agenda of the Raimondo administration and her team, championing her leadership in “sparking” an Ocean State comeback.

Separating one from the other was difficult, in part because the Brookings Institute report was paid for by private philanthropies, while the major client identified by Brookings when the project was initially announced in August of 2015 was Stefan Pryor, the head of CommerceRI.

Translated, it makes it difficult to determine where the fact-based report ends and the promotional sales job begins. Conversely, it makes it that much more difficult to ask questions about the report and its conclusions.

It may be far more revealing to ask Pryor at the news conference later today at the official unveiling of “Rhode Island Innovates” what he doesn’t like about the report and where he disagrees with its conclusions.

Equally telling is what will happen following the report’s release: will there be an opportunity for input – and not just from the business community – to enter into discussion, dialogue and questioning of the report’s content? Will the recommendations of the report become an integral part of the new proposed budget for FY 2017 by Raimondo, to be released in early February after her return from the world economic forum in Davos, Switzerland?

What the report says
The reality is that most Rhode Islanders will never read the report, cover to cover. Instead they will rely on what others have to say about it, with the translation provided by the news media, commentators and elected officials. And, what can be culled from posts on Facebook and tweets by the cognoscenti on Twitter. Much content may get lost in the translation.

Here, then, is a brief synopsis of the first three chapters, focused on the report’s research and analysis, taken from the report’s executive summary:

• Rhode Island has numerous unique assets but the state’s economy has been left adrift [there are recurring nautical themes used throughout the report] as a result of the decline of its core “advanced” industries.

Those assets include: a strategic location in the center of a 33 million-person megalopolis stretching from Portland, Maine, to New York City, a region with a combined economic output of some $2.1 trillion and an innovation output of some 16,000 patents.

They also include world-class academic and research institutions with expertise in biotech, the culinary arts, design, IT, oceanography and company management – what Brookings labels “a diversified portfolio of knowledge assets.

Further, Brookings identified the assets of Rhode Island’s quality of life, with towns and cities “rich in charm and urban cool” and, of course, those 400 miles of coastline.

• The collapse of what Brookings called the state’s legacy advanced industries, combined with the too-slow emergence of new industries, have left Rhode Island without a growth engine.

To get back on track, Rhode Island needs to build more resilient, future-oriented industry specializations capable of securing prosperity for the next generation.

The underperformance of the state’s economy has created what Brookings called a “dour mood,” although the report acknowledges that, in truth, “the state’s economic condition is less dire than middling.”

The report pointed to the state’s unemployment rate of 5.4 percent, the highest in the region, as evidence that Rhode Island’s growth capacity has deteriorated, due in large part to the shrinking of the state’s advanced industry employment base.

Underlying that trend is a deeper structural change in the industrial composition, anchored by its historical manufacturing sectors – jewelry, toy, and textiles industries – which have lost both size and traction.

In turn, Brookings defined advanced industries as a group of about 50 industries, ranging from aerospace to shipbuilding to renewable energy to biotech and computer design, which conduct large amounts of R&D with an orientation toward innovation, technology application, and exports. They also pay higher wages to workers and drive productivity growth.

The success of these industries, the report by Brookings said, “is a prerequisite for broadly shared prosperity.

• There are five advanced industry growth areas and two “opportunity industry” growth areas that have the best potential to rebuild Rhode Island’s high-value economic base.

The five growth areas had been shared in previous public presentations by the Brookings team. They include: biomedical innovation; defense shipbuilding and maritime; IT/software, cyber-physical systems, and data analytics, advanced business services, and design, food and custom manufacturing.

There are also two growth opportunity sectors identified: transportation, distribution and logistics, and arts, education, hospitality and tourism.

The choices of these targeted sectors for future growth were the result of a rigorous, three-step process that focused on cluster analysis, competencies, and “line-of sight” to large-scale market expansion.

Perhaps most notable was the inclusion of the biomedical innovation industry sector, which had been left out of previous economic analyses, with numerous skeptics having raised questions about whether “there was a there there.”

One important take-away was Brookings’ finding that Rhode Island’s “intricate webs of smaller interconnected industries, when aligned with core competencies,” add up to a finite set of legitimate broader growth opportunities. As a result, the state would not be well served by an investment strategy that relied on individual industry targets.

The recommendations
In order to leverage the growth opportunities, Brookings recommended that Rhode Island pursue a strategy of investing in the growth drivers of the recommended advanced industries targets while strengthening a statewide platform for growth.

• The three specific growth initiatives proposed by the Brookings report are: Rhode Island Innovates, Rhode Island Competes, and Rhode Island Acts, focused on what the think tank called “critical competitiveness drivers” at the center of any state’s growth platform.

These drivers include: the state’s innovation capacity, and its ability to generate new products, services, process and ways of managing; Rhode Island’s quality of place; and the collective talents, skills, competencies and know-how of its workforce.

The report also points out the existing weaknesses in these drivers: in innovation capacity, the paucity of industry-sponsored research and weak commercialization activities; in quality of place, the sense that the innovation community remains “atomized”; and in talent and skills, the challenge of whether the state can keep up with the rising demand for skilled workers that drive advanced industry growth.

The report also emphasizes the importance of “crosscutting supporting platforms” of the state’s business led civic engagement forces, particularly in pushing for regulatory and tax reform, but laments the lack of a central, high-powered CEO organization that “can mobilize money and organize at a decisive scale.”

The report then offers details of the specific initiatives it recommends:

Under the Rhode Island Innovates initiative, the state would:
• Invest in targeted faculty recruitment; provide grants to support proof-of-concept testing.
• Create a Global Innovation Challenge accelerator program, modeled on MassChallenge;
• Create an Entrepreneurs in Residence program to attract and retain foreign entrepreneurs;
• Create a new coding initiative to prepare more Rhode Islanders for careers in tech;
• Create and strengthen several innovation districts across the state, to serve as place-based industry/university/laboratory collaboration centers, enhancing talent attraction and retention.

Under the Rhode Island Competes initiative, in order to upgrade the state’s business environment, the state would:
• Strengthen the state’s underperforming R&D tax credit.
• Reform the unemployment insurance payroll tax.
• Modernize the state’s permitting regulations and processes, and expand Rhode Island’s e-permitting initiative statewide.
• Reduce or eliminate the restrictions of the state’s non-compete rules.
• Expand statewide land-assembly and site-preparation.
• Improve Rhode Island’s rail connections by targeting new subsidies and spearheading the development of a new app-based “Rhody Pass” ticket option.

And, under the Rhode Island Acts initiative, the state would seek to increase the capacity for business-led civic engagement by establishing a business-led Partnership for Rhode Island to facilitate strategic action amongst private, civic and public sector leaders.

What's missing?
There is a lot to digest in the report put together by the Brookings Institute, but much like the iterative process of innovation and the collision of ideas, identifying what’s missing, what may been overlooked or excluded from the report, and what are potential suggested improvements and better ideas to invest in, is a good place to start the conversation, moving forward.

Missing and overlooked:
Why wasn’t there any analysis of the state’s health care delivery system, Rhode Island’s largest private employer, a key economic driver of the state’s economy, beyond biomedical innovation?

Why were the innovations in health reform, health equity zones, and wellness and prevention at the community and neighborhood level, where Rhode Island is seen as a national leader – and the potential to replicate what is being done here in Rhode Island on a national level – not seen as an important part of the conversation and a future growth sector? Was it because the analysis was based on “business” and not on communities?

What were the lessons learned from the work that the Brookings Institute has done over the last decade with Gateway Cities in Massachusetts in promoting regional innovation economies, and why were they not part of the report?

Why was cultural diversity, one of the great strengths and assets of Rhode Island, not discussed as a key asset in future growth potential?

Better ideas?
Create an ROI scorecard that can track how state investments in these economic development arenas perform on a year-to-year basis, setting up the capability to compare these investments with other interventions and initiatives.

Develop a Rhode Island Quality of Life index, on a statewide and community basis, where the attributes can be measured and quantified beyond anecdotal evidence, and the social and economic disparities in health and education can be benchmarked.

Develop a Rhode Island Innovation Index to measure and benchmark the performance of the state’s innovation economy on an annual basis.

Create a digital health initiative, modeled on the recently announced Massachusetts initiative, marrying it to Big Data, leveraging Rhode Island’s existing talent, skills and resources.

Create a collaborative center around translational research and genomics, leveraging Rhode Island’s world-class research enterprise and industry know-how.

Questions to ask moving forward:
Does Rhode Island really need a further consolidation of business interests to advocate for its agenda, as recommended in the creation of a Partnership for Rhode Island?

What is the role that the state should play in the development of industry cluster groups to identify shared collaborative goals within a competitive marketplace?

Beyond building out the rail infrastructure to improve travel to Boston, is there a need to prioritize better public mass transit to connect Rhode Island communities beyond the apparently broken bus system?

What are the current metrics and benchmarks that the state economic development agency is using to measure and track job creation? How does the reality that job creation is a long-term process square with the political realities of a year-to-year state budgeting?