Who will Lead Change

Are we Masters of our Destiny or followers of others?

We see a lack of grassroots and neighbourhood community groups to make things happen locally.  Examples of Kitchener and Ottawa.  Is leadership top down or bottom up?

Do residents have responsibility for change?  Or are we waiting for others to tell us what to do?  We have religious and unions and big industry groups to give us what we need.  But if we had more local groups we could get people politically involved. Focus on starting small, and using that to spur action.  Example of micro loans in Bangladesh.  Use the same approach with public funds - govt role is to create small grants and loans to spur entrepreneurial ideas.  We can learn from the third world. Small is beautiful!!!

Windsor needs talent to start, but also infrastructure.  We need to have events to focus on Windsor.  Seminars, conferences, etc  Example Walmart show to potential suppliers held in Mississauga to pitch Walmart.

Do we lack venue?  You will get potential for business in future and also tourism spin offs in the immediate term.  Focus on attracting small and medium businesses and expanding local businesses.  Build on the base we have already.

More focus on R&D to help create "jobs that stay".  Need to have creativity to focus on new jobs to replace those that expire.  Some "e" focus is good, but we need a balance.  We need strong links to the community for those people who will create those jobs.  

There needs to be a balance between top down and bottom up.  Don't expect people to give it to you, but instead create it yourself.  Can't rely on govt, unions, big plants to give us what we need as a community.  We need to focus on our assets and exploit them.

Too much info flowing from US.  We need to figure out how to change our view of things.  

We could be a  logistics hub for North America.  Another example is how the local agricultural industry could change.  We should be taking the wine industry and moving from simply growing it to including tourism, cycling tours from winery to winery, etc.  Add more high end value add stuff.

Let business people exploit these ideas.  Maybe we need some small business support in banks.  Also some grants from government to help small business.  

However, can't put too much emphasis on small business for economic generation because the failure rate is high.  It is a big portion of our economy, however, so we can't ignore it.  SME's are a huge part of our economy.

Failure rate in small business is high, but they still contribute to economic growth.  We need to focus on new business where we diversify and engage in business in other than manufacturing.  Where is the leadership coming from? We need help from federal and provincial governments to ensure change happens.

Focus on government to change major strategic approach to manufacturing.  Problem may stem from this area's reliance on Big 3.  We didn't respond to changes in manufacturing when issues occur.  Moulds moving to China because of the free trade in US with China, instead of being made here in Windsor.

We are too late in changing economy.  Should have been doing this 20 years ago.  Problem with current strategies is that we are too focused on city itself and not on whole region (Tecumseh and Essex).

There's not one solution.  We need a balance of working together with local initiatives and provincial and federal support.  We need focus on future development with good infrastructure from government to support development.  We may need micro grants from small business and targeted grants to key industries to support research and development. We need to focus manufacturing on the future (changing skills, new technology, etc).