Tag Archives: Indiana Vision 2025

Beyond the Bicentennial: Chamber Outlines Policy Recommendations for 2016 Candidates

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Indiana has many advantages as a leading location to operate a business, raise a family or enjoy a high quality of life. But still more needs to be done to improve that climate and to keep pace with other cities and states, says the Indiana Chamber of Commerce.

The organization unveiled today its six-week Beyond the Bicentennial campaign (going beyond the state’s first 200 years). It focuses on the “most potentially impactful public policies” and is directed foremost at the major party gubernatorial candidates, John Gregg and Eric Holcomb.

The Indiana Chamber’s Indiana Vision 2025 plan, first introduced in 2012, serves as the campaign blueprint. “The Indiana Vision 2025 economic drivers present a great opportunity to highlight initiatives that will benefit Indiana now and in the years ahead,” offers Indiana Chamber President and CEO Kevin Brinegar.

The first of the four letters, also released today, emphasizes the Outstanding Talent driver. Recommendations focus on critical improvements at the K-12, postsecondary and workforce levels. In an annual survey earlier this year, 45% of responding employers indicated they had left jobs unfilled in the past year due to under-qualified applicants.

“Outstanding Talent is both the greatest challenge for our state and the area of most importance,” Brinegar states. “While businesses are rightfully concerned about their current and future workforces, for individuals we’re talking about the difference between happy, productive lives and what can amount to an economic death sentence if proper education and training are not received.”

The education/workforce needs range from greatly expanding the state’s pre-K pilot program to more students from low-income families, to assisting the more than 700,000 Hoosiers with some college but no credential or degree to gain the skills needed for a rapidly-evolving economy.

Concludes Brinegar, “We hope the recommendations and guidance in these letters will help the gubernatorial candidates and all lawmakers focus on what public policies could be the most impactful for Hoosiers.”

Additional Beyond the Bicentennial letters and accompanying videos will be made available on September 13 (Attractive Business Climate), September 27 (Superior Infrastructure) and October 11 (Dynamic & Creative Culture).

The Outstanding Talent releases are available now at www.indianachamber.com/letters.

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WGU Indiana Chancellor Allison Barber spoke at our press event this morning: “We want to encourage employers to set the standard that talent matters.”

About Indiana Vision 2025
In 2012, the Indiana Chamber published Indiana Vision 2025, a comprehensive, multi-year initiative to provide leadership and a long-range economic development action plan for Indiana. The mission statement: “Indiana will be a global leader in innovation and economic opportunity where enterprises and citizens prosper.”

A 24-person statewide task force of business and organization leaders developed the original plan. Many from that group, with some additions, worked for four months earlier this year to review progress, update goals and metrics, and identify potential new research to enhance future Report Cards (progress on each of the now 36 goals under the four drivers is assessed every other year).

The Indiana Chamber thanks Duke Energy, NIPSCO, Old National Bank, Vectren and all the investors in Indiana Vision 2025.

Learn more about Indiana Vision 2025 at www.indianachamber.com/2025.

 

VIDEO: See What’s in the New Edition of BizVoice

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Our Senior VP and editor of BizVoice Tom Schuman explains what’s in the March/April edition. If you’re interested in higher education, corporate social responsibility or Vanderburgh County, we have information you can’t miss.

This issue also focuses on the “Outstanding Talent” driver of the Indiana Chamber’s Indiana Vision 2025 plan.

Read BizVoice online today.

Your Chance to Weigh in on Indiana’s Future

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RMaking Indiana as successful as it can be is the goal of the Indiana Chamber’s Indiana Vision 2025 plan. The Indiana University Public Policy Institute has an initiative working toward the same outcome in Thriving Communities, Thriving State.

I’m pleased to have the opportunity to serve as a “commissioner” on one of the three working groups. Former Lt. Gov. Kathy Davis and former Indiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Randy Shepard are the co-chairs.

Upcoming public input sessions will take place across the state. The goal: encourage discussions among government, nonprofit and private sector leaders about issues that are or will be critical to Indiana’s future — to provide policy options for action.

The sessions (the first one took place in Gary on February 5) are all from 2:00-4:00 p.m.:

  • February 10: Evansville, University of Southern Indiana
  • February 17: Indianapolis, Urban League
  • February 26: Columbus, Irwin Conference Center
  • March 3: Fort Wayne, Indiana University-Purdue University

Additional information is available from Debbie Wyeth at dwyeth@iupui.edu.

It’s All About Innovation

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Innovation (and workforce and a few other things) is the name of the game when it comes to Indiana business development. It’s featured throughout the Indiana Chamber’s Indiana Vision 2025 plan. And innovation will be the focus of a late August event.

Centric is an Indianapolis-based innovation think tank and networking group, with the goal of making the city (and beyond) a globally recognized center for innovation. The Indiana Innovation Awards strive to recognize innovation and excellence throughout the state. The two come together at Centric’s Day of Innovation on August 28.

To be nominated for the awards, an organization must have launched a product or service in the past three years that has shown success and is considered innovative in its market. Past Indiana Innovation Awards winners include Cultural Trail, TinderBox, Delta Faucet, Yikes, Brackets for Good, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and many others.

 

 

Study: Time for Docs to Advise Patients to Kick the Habit

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Indiana maintains its unfortunate top 10 ranking as a state with one of the highest levels of people who smoke. A goal of Indiana Vision 2025 is to reduce that 24% adult rate.

A recent study says doctors can help, but many are skipping the opportunity to guide their patients.

Nationally, less than half of adult smokers report that their physicians advise them to stop smoking, while about two-thirds of physicians say lack of patient motivation to quit smoking is a barrier to medical interventions.

The JAMA Internal Medicine study, titled “Patient Engagement During Medical Visits and Smoking Cessation Counseling,” examined the relationship between patient engagement — or how involved people are in their health care — and the likelihood that physicians would counsel patients to stop smoking.

The study by Peter Cunningham, Ph.D., of Virginia Commonwealth University, was conducted for for the National Institute for Health Care Reform while he was a senior fellow at the former Center for Studying Health System Change. Based on a 2012 survey of 8,656 current and retired autoworkers and their spouses younger than 65, the study included 1,904 current smokers and assessed their engagement levels depending on whether they had ever talked with their physician about health information they found on the Internet, had someone accompany them to a medical visit for support, had taken notes during a medical visit to help remember what was said, and had brought a list of questions to ask during a medical visit.

Highly engaged patients were more likely to report that their physicians had advised them to stop smoking, the study found. And, highly engaged patients whose physicians counseled them to stop smoking were the most likely to attempt to quit (75%), while patients with low engagement levels who did not receive counseling were the least likely to attempt quitting (46%). However, if counseled by their physician, 60 percent of smokers with low engagement levels attempted to quit smoking, the study found.

“Clinicians should not misinterpret lack of patient engagement during medical encounters as unwillingness to quit because the results of this study suggest that counseling of even less engaged patients is effective in getting them to attempt quitting,” the article states.

The findings strongly suggest “that clinicians respond differently to patients who are highly engaged during medical encounters than they do to less engaged patients in terms of advising patients to stop smoking. Nevertheless, even patients with low levels of engagement can benefit from this counseling,” the article concludes.

Working to Build Business Success Stories

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Have you done business with or heard of either Gear Brake or Groom HQ? Probably not — at least yet. These are two of the promising start-ups that went through the Velocity Indiana accelerator program earlier this year and are now co-working in the Jeffersonville space to build their business dreams.

We’ll do a quick Q&A with Chris Bailey (Gear Brake) and Andrew Klawier (Groom HQ) as part of a July-August BizVoice magazine story on Velocity (in just its second year) and its potential. It will be part of an Indiana Vision 2025 focus on Dynamic and Creative Culture that includes:

  • Drones and their Indiana impact
  • Launch Indiana, another effort to develop entrepreneurs
  • A one-on-one with Kent Parker, an Indiana native who experienced business success in several locations around the country
  • A roundtable discussion on entrepreneurial financing

BizVoice goes in the mail June 30 and all stories will be available online on that date.

It’s a Big Fat Global Problem

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It’s been well documented that Indiana has an obesity problem. It doesn’t diminish that challenge to know that we’re not alone.

According to a recent ABC News story, “almost a third of the world is now fat, and no country has been able to curb obesity rates in the last three decades.”

Researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington reviewed more than 1,700 studies (that took place between 1980 and 2013) from 188 countries. A few findings:

  • Two billion people worldwide are overweight or obese
  • In the Middle East and North Africa, nearly 60% of men and 65% of women are heavy
  • About two in three adults in the United Kingdom are overweight, making it the fattest country in Western Europe

The research showed a link between income and obesity — as people obtain more money, their waistlines also expand.

As we’ve been telling you the last two-and-a-half years, the Indiana Chamber’s Indiana Vision 2025 plan has a goal — reduce obesity levels to less than 20% of the population — as part of its Attractive Business Climate driver. We’re focusing on workplace wellness this summer during our free Connect & Collaborate luncheons.

It’s a big, global challenge — one that each of us needs to try to tackle in our state by working together.

We Want Your (Our) Water

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It’s water war time once again — maybe. We’ve reported in the past 18 months on a number of state battles over water resources, while all the time emphasizing the need for a comprehensive Indiana plan to ensure long-term supplies for our citizens and businesses. It’s part of our Indiana Vision 2025 blueprint.

The West and South are the locale of many such skirmishes, but the latest comes from the middle of the country. Namely, it’s the Missouri River and Kansas wanting to “divert” some of the water to irrigate crops in the western part of its state.

Some details, courtesy of the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper:

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has asked Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback to back off of a feasibility study of Kansas taking water from the Missouri River to divert to western Kansas.

“The Missouri River is a resource that is vital to Missouri’s way of life and our economy,” Nixon said in a letter to Brownback.

Describing the Missouri River as the “lifeblood” of numerous communities, Nixon said the river provides drinking water and is used to ship goods to markets.

“We have worked for many years, and fought many legal battles, to ensure the River is managed properly,” Nixon wrote. “Thoughtful and reasoned discussion and cooperation, rather than unilateral plans for massive diversions, must be the guiding forces in planning for the River’s use,” he urged.

Nixon’s letter to Brownback was in response to the Kansas Water Office’s plan to commission a study on a proposal to divert water from the Missouri River and transport that water through canals some 360 miles to irrigate crops in western Kansas.

The so-called Kansas Aqueduct Project has been on the shelf for decades, but has recently been re-emphasized by water officials in Kansas.

Tracy Streeter, director of the Kansas Water Office, said the idea is to divert water at high flow or flood times on the Missouri River. That would help Kansas farmers and alleviate downstream flooding on the Missouri, he said. The water office is the state’s water agency, which conducts water planning and helps make state water policy.

But Nixon said while Missourians have suffered through flooding on the Missouri River, they have also depended on the river during droughts.

 

Indiana Vision 2025 Report Card

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Chamber President Kevin Brinegar recently spoke with Inside INdiana Business about our Indiana Vision 2025 Report Card, which was unveiled this week. See the video. Additionally, here is a link to the report card itself, and below is a summary of the findings:

A snapshot of where Indiana ranks nationally in 60 key economic measurements was released today by the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. The report includes revealing outcomes both for areas in which Indiana is doing well – regulatory freedom and small business survival, for example – and where improvement needs to take place – such as post-secondary education attainment and the state’s poverty rate.

This report is the next step in Indiana Vision 2025, a comprehensive, multi-year initiative to provide leadership and a long-range economic development action plan for Indiana. It marks the start of the Indiana Chamber examining key metrics at two-year intervals through 2025, covering progress in four critical areas: Outstanding Talent, Attractive Business Climate, Superior Infrastructure and a Dynamic and Creative Culture.

The overriding message, says Indiana Chamber President and CEO Kevin Brinegar, is that the state cannot afford to rest on recent laurels like the education reforms of 2011 and instituting a right-to-work law in 2012. "We can’t be fatigued by the effort or take a break on improving Indiana. Other states and countries are moving at a fast pace and we need to remain competitive in order to have a prosperous environment for our citizens."

And in areas where Indiana is currently lagging, change will not happen overnight, Brinegar cautions. "It will take a robust effort by like-minded groups to affect both policy and societal changes that impact these metrics. Significant advances by Indiana also can be undone through inattention, poor policy choices or the dramatic actions of other states and nations."

While passing good public policies, where appropriate, are one element of this larger picture, Brinegar asserts the key is implementation. “There has been no better example of that than education reforms. Too much time, money and effort has been spent the last two years on efforts to reverse 2011 achievements (school choice voucher program, charter school expansion) rather than ensuring these are implemented at the highest level to assist Hoosier students and families.

"Our No. 1 priority has to be investing in the education, knowledge and skills of Hoosiers. Our goal is to achieve prosperity and cultivate a world-class environment full of opportunities," he concludes.

When it comes to the report card’s specific ratings, the most progress has been made in building an Attractive Business Climate. Indiana is at the very top for the regulatory freedom index and in the top five of the small business survival index. (Separately, Indiana’s business climate was recently ranked fifth best nationally and best in the Midwest by Chief Executive magazine).

Indiana has also enjoyed advances regarding its Dynamic and Creative Culture – most notably jumping into the top 10 for business research and development.

Further work, however, is needed in producing Outstanding Talent. More Hoosiers attaining associate’s degrees and higher plus focusing on early education are among the keys. A disturbing placement is Indiana’s poverty rating. Indiana has gone from having the 12th lowest poverty rate in the nation in 2000, to 32nd in 2005 and now 35th in 2011.

"This illustrates the sad reality for some of our citizens and emphasizes why workforce training, sending children to pre-school, completing high school and beyond are so vital. Only when we put greater focus on these activities will we have a significant impact on moving people out of poverty," Brinegar surmises.

Meanwhile, Indiana’s Superior Infrastructure driver has been an advantage for the state, but the dynamic surrounding road funding and energy costs is changing. Case in point: Indiana is trending in the wrong direction for affordable electricity, dropping to 19th in 2011 (was 11th in 2000 and 12th in 2005).

A summary of Indiana’s top and bottom rankings, the biggest gains and drops, plus the goals established for each is available at www.indianachamber.com/2025. The report card, the Indiana Vision 2025 plan and additional information are also available at that site.