Michael Porter Takes Regional Economic Development to Task

Speaking at the University of Minnesota where on Sept 30th Harvard launched its new Cluster Mapping tool, Michael Porter talked about the focus of Regional Economic Development offices. He suggest these activities are typically low yield activities. He concludes, in this 4 minute snippet, that we need to focus on something else. Here is the graphic he used:

Here is the video snippet that goes along with the slide:
In the book "Advantage: Business Competition in the New Normal" it starts out saying, "What makes a company a competitive powerhouse is how well it solves a customer problem…Being better than your competition in the enterprise of problem solving is key…Innovation is a special kind of problem solving…Innovation is creating new knowledge that solves a customer problem and provides competitive advantage."