Painting the picture this way, these are tall odds to overcome for us to remain competitive, let alone lead the pack.

Yet, there is another, very different, picture to paint, one rooted in our history of opportunism and spurred on by contemporary opportunities. Historically, we are a country that has built its preeminence through diversity and innovation. Consider, for example, the building of the Erie Canal--a feat that Peter L. Bernstein describes in his wonderful book, Wedding of the Waters. He writes that a ragtag team with "unwearied zeal" defied all odds, with very little formal support, to do what Thomas Jefferson called at the time a task "little short of madness"--thereby ushering in the industrial revolution in America.

Flash forward and recall the spirit of invention and innovation that brought the information revolution that has now made the world "flat." We are a nation where innovation repeatedly emerges from the multidimensional diversity of our population, encouraged by personal and market freedoms, and cultivated through a broad-based (as well as technical) education. We have colleges and universities that are the envy of the world, producing innovation that matters, from Internet search engines to overnight delivery to open-heart surgery.

Solutions for our Future

Therefore, instead of bemoaning the statistics, it is time to ask how we "rise above this gathering storm" 6 by drawing on the strength of our diversity and the penchant for innovation that has differentiated us in the past.

We can build today's Erie Canal--even with our struggling cities and our formidable global competition. When they did it before, life was harsh in its own way--in the words of a visitor in 1820 to Syracuse, it was a land so "desolate it would make an owl weep to fly over it." Although today's circumstances might evoke similar reactions in some, I see tremendous opportunity waiting to be harnessed if we put our minds to it, with the "unwearied zeal" of generations gone by. But it will take commitment in several ways:

Tapping our Diversity

Let's start with the basic observation that we are turning our backs on our talent pool. Quite simply, America cannot leave its fastest growing population behind and expect to compete. Or, to say this more positively, we have an untapped differentiation lever and it is our multidimensional diversity--over the history of our economy, we've built innovation by educating and engaging a very broad mix of people. We need to do it again. And this will require paying close attention to the education of children in the inner city and rural schools of our nation, while investing in the entrepreneurial potential of their parents.

Recently, I was honored to serve as part of a group of educators and community and policy leaders, who were convened by New York University's Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, and led by former Secretary of Education, the Honorable Richard W. Riley. Our group presented "A Call to Action" titled: "With All Deliberate Speed:" Achievement, Citizenship and Diversity in American Education. In our Call to Action, we begin with the promise for our future--the increasingly diverse American population.

Almost half of America's children aged five or under belong to a racial or ethnic minority. Yet despite the future competitiveness lever these children represent, we are failing to educate them. From Syracuse to Cleveland, and all across America, too many children are lost in the midst of racially isolated, high-poverty, under-resourced, and under-performing public schools. And there are consequences, summarized in the Call to Action with a simple statistic as follows: "...students from historically disadvantaged minority groups have only a 50 percent chance of finishing high school with a diploma." Not surprisingly, therefore, the educational pipeline is leaking all along the way.

As the Call to Action notes: "Nowhere is college participation lower than among African American and Hispanic youth; nowhere is the potential to meet our nation's need for college graduates greater." And there is even more under-representation from these groups and from women generally in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce, where our stiffest global competition resides. This, then, is not the picture of a nation using its talent, especially one that has built its preeminence on the creativity of a diverse population encouraged by personal and market freedoms to contribute to innovation.

How do we retrieve this lost talent and strengthen the educational pipeline that will feed innovation? There is, of course, no one answer to this question, and there are many important educational reforms happening across our country today. The Call to Action, for example, highlights the many necessary elements of a high-quality education, such as teacher preparation, smaller class sizes, upgrading facilities into community learning centers, and a focus on adolescent literacy. It also calls for increased support for the "schools as centers of community" approach--which would make our schools true centerpieces of our communities, as envisioned within the 21st-Century Learning Communities grants from the Department of Education. Clearly, we need greater federal, state, and local investment in our high-poverty, racially isolated schools. At the same time, we must not overlook the re-segregation of our nation's schools, and incentives must be put in place for communities to create diverse learning environments. And this is one of many aspects of reform, one which our higher education institutions and the business community can join together to make a difference. But what can we do to start making this a reality and begin to tap the nearly limitless potential of our yet untapped talent pool?

There is widespread agreement that there simply must be a tighter connection forged between higher education and K-12 education. That is why, for example, the Call to Action puts a great deal of emphasis on the Early College High School movement, as well as programs that involve middle school students early with college preparation. This connection will produce substantial benefits for the educational pipeline. Furthermore, it will connect students who otherwise spend most of their time in racially isolated schools to the diverse learning environments of two- and four-year colleges and universities.

As a first step, there needs to be more public dialogue about K-12-higher education linkages. That is why the American Council on Education is joining with the Ad Council of America--the people who brought us "A mind is a terrible thing to waste"--to launch a public information campaign later this year aimed at students in the 8th, 9th, and 10th grades, and their parents, educating them about the need to prepare for college. There is a striking lack of knowledge--not surprisingly, most evident in the high-poverty, racially isolated schools of our inner cities--about the course preparation required to attend college, and about the resources, both financial and educational, available to plan for college. In focus groups for this campaign, time and again, the aspirations of low-income students were high, but the understanding of what it would take to make it to college was very weak. While many inner-city students, for example, see high school athletes recruited by colleges, they do not have a comparable "college-going vision" for themselves. And when they do reach out for guidance, low-income students turn almost exclusively to high school counselors late in their high school years, while upper-income students report using a panoply of guides, including parents, friends, college representatives, and web-based material, starting in middle school and early on in high school. Even if the disparities in the quality and quantity of education between rich and poor, black, brown, and white, don't doom students initially, the absence of strong connections to the world of colleges and universities can surface as a substantial obstacle to future success. But we can do something about that, as you are doing in Cleveland and we are doing in Syracuse.

In Syracuse, we have formed a new "Partnership for Better Education" with the Syracuse City School District. This partnership, announced by myself and the superintendent in 2005, is a disciplined attempt to draw together the resources of Syracuse University and the Syracuse city schools, by incorporating a myriad of our pre-existing programmatic and pipeline relationships, and focusing on curriculum building, especially in the smaller learning communities embedded within each high school in the city. The Partnership is just that--an engagement that pairs faculty from city schools with SU faculty to build curriculum for these learning communities in the arts, literacy, and STEM disciplines. Importantly, it also brings the students from the city schools to our campus, and takes our college students to the schools.

For example, the past school year saw major literacy-through-the-arts projects created, with students in middle and high schools using photography, film, and video to document their lives, their families, and their communities, and then writing in poetry and prose about their art. Each project in the Partnership weaves in an emphasis on inclusion (of students with differing learning styles and needs) and on literacy, even as the medium of expression shifts, for example, from the art studio to the engineering laboratory. Each project moves back and forth between campus and schools, to maximize the sharing of both resources and experiences, and works to familiarize the middle and high school students with college life. It also draws in students who are identified as part of our ongoing pipeline programs, such as the Syracuse Challenge (which mentors students from 8th grade on to prepare them for college) and the Syracuse GEAR-UP program and Science and Technology Entry Program. Connecting these students, the Partnership provides them intense, hands-on learning outside their classrooms, in our Saturday Learning Academy and Summer College on campus.

Because this partnership connects the leadership of the city schools and the University, it has the best chance of being able to utilize the full range of human and intellectual capital at our disposal. It also well-positions us to attract financial support from the corporate community and integrate programs and projects with federal, state, and local initiatives over time.

One of the most important aspects of the Partnership is that it mobilizes across sectors--education, not-for-profits, business, and government--with a collaboration that focuses on both the curriculum that students need to learn to prepare for college and careers, and on the process of integrating low-income and minority students and students with disabilities into the pipeline for college attendance.

I know that the business community and higher education are actively engaged in similar collaborations here in Cleveland, such as KeyCorp/Bank's engagement with the theme schools in East High, its connections to the Cleveland Museum of Art with internships and distance education that articulates with Cuyahoga, Lakeland, and Lorain community colleges, and serves as part of a comprehensive program to empower Cleveland's growing Hispanic community. It is precisely this integrated and comprehensive approach, uniting communities, colleges and universities, cultural institutions, and supportive businesses and foundations, which has the most likelihood of setting our cities and our school systems on a path to educate, promote, and financially support the college-going vision of our fastest growing, but often under-appreciated, talent pool.

Investing in our Communities

As we collaborate to engage the untapped talent of the children in our cities and communities across the nation, let us not forget to invest in women, and in adults of color--often the parents of these children--who represent another largely unrecognized and untapped resource and competitive opportunity. Clearly, there is a great need for entrepreneurial development among women and racial and ethnic minority groups in our communities. Interestingly, while they currently represent the fastest growing sectors of business start-ups, statistics also indicate that women-owned and minority-owned businesses comprise a disproportionately small number of high growth businesses, and receive a surprisingly small percentage of venture funds for business growth. According to data from the National Women's Business Council, for example, between 1997 and 2002, women started an average of 424 new ventures each day, or 775,000 new businesses per year, comprising 55 percent of all new venture start-ups. However, a large majority of these firms start and stay small, never employing more than 10 people, and never positioning themselves for high growth. According to a report from the Kauffman Foundation, women received less than 5 percent of the venture capital investments made in the United States over the past 40 years.16 Moreover, many minority and low-income entrepreneurs are being left behind in their new businesses by the digital commerce revolution, a trend that is fueled by the strong correlations between income, education, and computer literacy and usage.

As we observed in the disparity between college-going aspirations and preparation among many of our inner-city youth, the entrepreneurial energy in even the most challenged neighborhoods is high, but the preparation for and external investment in business growth is lagging. This, again, is something that we can and must work to change.

Let me illustrate both the challenges and the opportunities surrounding this issue with a case study from the City of Syracuse. Not unlike other cities around the country, the City of Syracuse has seen substantial population loss to the surrounding suburbs, leaving behind a disproportionate share of the county's population of color (87 percent of all African Americans in Onondaga County live in the city) and of families in poverty (95 percent of the African American families in Onondaga County living below the poverty level reside in Syracuse).

Facing immense challenges, neighborhoods like the majority minority South Side are organizing to revitalize their economic, social, and educational base. Our colleges and universities--from Onondaga Community College to Morrisville State College to Le Moyne College and Syracuse University--are forming partnerships with neighborhood coalitions to join in building back up the South Side and its surrounding areas. And foundations with strong local ties, especially the Key Foundation and the Gifford Foundation, are providing critical seed funding for these partnerships.

Here, for example, are four key projects that our Whitman School of Management's Falcone Center for Entrepreneurship is doing to tap into that as yet unrealized base of women and minority entrepreneurs on Syracuse's South Side:

As these programs take shape and become fixtures in the South Side, every day there are new examples of an emerging entrepreneurial base that holds promise for the future--whether it is Tunisia Johnson, who, with her mother, has developed and patented the first "fitted blanket," or long-time community leader and business woman, Carol Perry, whose South Side Newsstand made its first online sales this year, or Amatullah Yaminin, a graduate of the Bootcamp and WISE, who, with the help of our Whitman School of Management students, saved a South Side shoe store, and, in the process, learned enough about inventory and electronic tracking to know how to make it profitable.

Without question, far too much of the talent in the South Side of Syracuse and, for that matter, in cities all across the country, has heretofore gone untapped--with dollars flowing from the neighborhood and distress and discouragement flowing into it. Now is the time for all of us to invest in this pool of talent, hopes, and dreams, and build a sustainable infrastructure for neighborhood business growth. As we know, initiatives that can empower minority communities are critical work toward this goal, as recognized by the City Club of Cleveland and KeyBank through their joint Hispanic Initiatives series, which engages area residents and local leaders in dialogues aimed at empowering the Hispanic community to play a larger, more active role in the economic, educational, civic, political, and social life of greater Cleveland.

Innovation that Matters

To meet the pressing needs of our communities, from Syracuse to Cleveland, we must not only ensure educational quality and access to our fastest growing population, while igniting the entrepreneurial energy of potential women and minority business owners, but also commit ourselves, from universities to corporations, to investing in innovation that matters.

At a recent meeting convened by IBM, which I attended, titled "Innovation That Matters," business leaders, policy-makers, and educators from all over the world seemed to agree that to compete today, one needs to be nimble, able to form different groups, work "horizontally" across units and companies, share intellectual property, (even with competitors!), and understand what one is doing well beyond the technical expertise of yesteryear.19 We also agreed that succeeding at building this kind of entrepreneurial environment for innovation, could matter not just to capturing market share for businesses and universities, but also to our ability to address the complex pressing issues of our day--from environmental sustainability to failing schools and shrinking cities. How can we ensure that our innovation matters?

To take a lesson from the global corporations that are succeeding in innovation that matters, we cannot organize ourselves in business-as-usual silos--the problems are too big and complex and the competition too fierce to do it alone. Instead, we need to mobilize what I will call entrepreneurial SWAT teams--built on collaborations across sectors with diverse "communities of experts" sharing intellectual property and capital to find solutions and effect change. The problems affect all of us, and no one will own the solutions. Moreover, everyone--from colleges and universities to industry, from government to not-for-profits--has expertise to contribute. We need to let innovation flourish by making the most of our multidimensional diversity, and personal and market freedoms, and to do that we need to lower the barriers to collaboration and encourage a nimble, flexible organizational structure for attacking problems and finding solutions.

And, this is another arena in which I believe that America can excel, if we put our minds to it; we must specifically engage colleges and universities. This is where the lion's share of solutions has historically been found and where we prepare the people who will change the world, as the American Council on Education's "Solutions for our Future" campaign suggests. In a knowledge economy, it is quite obvious to all that the private benefits of higher education are substantial--college graduates are healthier, happier, wealthier, and live longer than those who do not attend higher education. By contrast, we often forget the societal benefits of American higher education, a system that remains the envy of the world, at a time when we are not particularly envied around the globe. Research and innovation on college campuses benefits us all, as do the "good neighbor benefits," as economists label the increased likelihood that college graduates will volunteer, participate in the democratic process, and be more tolerant of other groups and cultures different from their own. What are colleges and universities doing to maximize the societal benefits of higher education in a world in which we need all the innovation we can get, and quickly?

More and more, America's four-year and two-year colleges and universities, private as well as public, are teaming up--with each other, their communities, and their corporate partners--to form these entrepreneurial SWAT teams to address the sustainability of the cities and regions to which they are connected by geography and history, and into which they recruit their faculty, students, and staff as residents. In a recent speech, I suggested, for example, that the numerous colleges and universities in upstate New York form an Upstate Pathway of Connected Communities, for ideas and innovations to flow from Albany to Buffalo, shadowing the old Erie Canal. These institutions, I argued, can play to the strengths of each campus-community hub, from nanotechnology to environmental systems and energy to stem cell research or innovation in the arts and public humanities. Of course, to do so we all need to get better at collaborating and sharing, just as our corporate partners have found. But this can be done, and I will provide two examples from Syracuse.

First, the Syracuse Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems. Syracuse University is the lead institution in a consortium of 12 academic and research institutions and more than 70 firms (that range in size from five-person to multinationals) concentrating on innovations that address the sustainability of our urban ecosystem, from built to natural environments that affect human health, productivity, security, and quality of life. While the headquarters (with laboratories and test-bed facilities) is in the process of being built on a former brownfield site in downtown Syracuse 40 yards from the banks of the original Erie Canal, the innovations are already flowing from campus to campus, and into the marketplace with our corporate partners. Even the Carrier Corporation, after pulling out much of its manufacturing base from Syracuse, is reinvesting in an Indoor Air Quality Laboratory, which will be situated in the new Center of Excellence headquarters.

And speaking of the quality of our lived environments, it is critical that we not forget opportunities for invigoration through the arts and culture. These days, it is widely believed that arts and cultural expression can be an avenue for what ails many of our shrinking cities--bringing audiences that contribute to the economy of cities, improving the quality of life through socially conscious design in our troubled neighborhoods; encouraging people to cross boundaries of geography, tradition, culture, language, and faith; and giving voice and hope to our children.

The City of Syracuse is, I believe, in the middle of a bold experiment to test that hypothesis. The city has maintained, despite its challenges, a vibrant arts community--with an opera, museum, symphony, and stage, as well as numerous grassroots arts organizations and community-based galleries and theaters. Syracuse University, despite its somewhat isolated location up on "the Hill," has a tradition of bringing its artists, architects, humanists, and journalists downtown, specifically through the Syracuse Stage and the Community Folk Art Center and Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company, and the Community Design Center. Now, with the help of our many partners, we are really coming off the Hill.

Taking this connection to a whole new level, we have renovated a 135,000-square-foot, former furniture warehouse downtown, which now houses programs in our Schools of Architecture, and Visual and Performing Arts, and in Arts Journalism. With support from the state of New York and several local foundations, private donors, and corporations, we were able to dedicate the entire first floor of The Warehouse to community space, and it includes a gallery, teen arts center, artist resource room, and more.

In a further connection between the campus and downtown, we are leading a consortium comprising the University, the City of Syracuse, National Grid, and Time Warner, supported by our entire congressional delegation, to create a "Connective Corridor" of the arts. The corridor will connect--both physically and metaphorically--the city's arts organizations with each other and with the businesses and neighbors in their vicinity. It will cover a 1.5-mile stretch that includes all the major arts institutions, and crosses over Interstate 81, a symbol of a divided past between the University hill and the city. It will include a lighted streetscape, public art, an Internet-wired pedestrian and bus path, and plenty of room for happenings and advertising to bring people, both our students and the community as whole, to it as a destination point. Not only is this a project with unprecedented collaboration across sectors in Syracuse--public, private, local, state, and federal, university, and business--but it also cements our faith in and commitment to invigoration through the arts.

Building Intellectual and Social Capital for our Future

At the end of the day, our cities and our people will succeed if we invest in each other. It sounds so simple, and we know it is so hard. This is why you created this Diversity Thought Leadership Series, and why the Cleveland Commission on Economic Partnerships and Inclusion has teamed up with 72 companies in the Cleveland area to promote diversity and innovation together. As Margot Copeland, executive vice president and director of corporate diversity at KeyCorp, says: "Bringing people together in a business environment who did not grow up in the same neighborhoods or attend the same places of worship, and collectively leveraging these natural assets and resources, is challenging lifetime work."

The key to success, whether it is in Syracuse or Cleveland, will be if we learn to speak to each other--black, brown, and white; university and business; Christian, Jewish, and Muslim--it doesn't matter what the divide is, it matters whether we are willing to invest together. How will this happen? In Syracuse, it is happening through community-based organizations like Women Transcending Boundaries, a group started after 9/11,28 and the Inter-Religious Council's Community-Wide Dialogues to End Racism,29 which reaches not only into our schools but also into the business community to establish inter-group dialogues. Colleges and universities in our area are also creating inter-group dialogue curricula to prepare students for the most diverse and yet divided world ever to confront them. And, I know the same thing is happening in Cleveland, not only in the business coalitions mentioned above, but also in the rich array of colleges and universities, from Case Western to Cleveland State and John Carroll and Hiram College to Cuyahoga Community College.

What we all know well is that our students and employees do not come to us with any experience in investing in each other. They haven't lived or learned together; they believe that any advantage given another will detract from them. Somehow, we all have to learn the lesson of collaboration and interdependence. We have to build intellectual capital by investing in the education and entrepreneurial opportunities of our untapped diverse talent pool. But we also have to build social capital--trusted networks of colleagues and collaborators sharing problems and solutions--and cross the many boundaries of life experience, cultures, and traditions that might otherwise divide and greatly weaken the environment for innovation.

Without the networks of trust, people won't be willing to gamble that progress can come their way. To succeed we will need to think--and act--in new ways.

This may sound daunting, but remember, when construction began on the Erie Canal, America had no trained civil engineers. Despite this, the determination to succeed overcame the project's many obstacles. As Bernstein described: "These were men who would dare to experiment and keep on experimenting until they got it right." Bernstein also quotes Nobel Whitford, the early 20th-century historian, who seemed to have a handle on their recipe for success: "What they did not understand they conquered by diligent study, unwearied zeal, and sound common sense."

As a social psychologist, I would add to that list; that those who built the Erie Canal had the ability to trust each other and to draw on the diversity of minds. They had to do that to succeed in their time and place, and we must do the same to succeed in ours.

Some will say that today we have more divisive and prevailing boundaries to overcome in building trust than ever before. But I believe that we can do it too, if we show that same gumption our forebears displayed nearly 200 years ago.

It is our responsibility, our duty to do so. It must come our way to replace desolation with aspirations; as those who built the Erie Canal knew, we can't let the owl weep.

Footnotes

1 Delivered to 2006 KeyBank Diversity Thought Leadership Series, The City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio, June 9, 2006.

2 The National Academies, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, http://fermat.nap.edu/execsumm_pdf/11463, 2006.

3 Peter L. Bernstein, Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 23.

4 Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

5 Innovation That Matters, IBM Conference, Rome, 2006, and Solutionsforourfuture.org, American Council on Education, 2006.

6 The National Academies, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, http://fermat.nap.edu/execsumm_pdf/11463, 2006.

7 Peter L. Bernstein, Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 361.

8 LaMar P. Miller, "With All Deliberate Speed:" Achievement, Citizenship and Diversity in American Education, Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, The Steinhardt School of Education, New York University, 2005.

9 Ibid, p. 17.

10 Ibid, p. 18.

11 Jo Handelsman, Nancy Cantor, Molly Carnes, Denice Denton, Eve Fine, Barbara Grosz, Virginia Hinshaw, Cora Marrett, Sue Rosser, Donna Shalala, and Jennifer Sheridan, "More Women in Science," Science, v. 309, 1190-1191, August, 2005.

12 ACE: Access Initiative, http://www.acenet.edu.

13 See KeyCorp (KeyBank) press releases from 11/17/2005; 1/24/2006; 10/13/2005.

14 Center for Women's Business Research, 2004 (based on U.S. Census Bureau data).

15 National Women's Business Council, 2005.

16 The Diana Report, Kauffman Foundation.

17 Year 2000, U.S. Census Bureau. (Onondaga County total population in 2000 was 458,336, of which 147,306 lived in the City of Syracuse).

18 KeyCorp press release 9/13/2005 http://www.csrwire.com/article.cgi/4404.html.

19 Innovation That Matters, Conference organized by IBM, Rome, April 2006.

20 IBM, Global Innovation Outlook 2.0, 2006.

21 See Solutionsforourfuture.org, American Council on Education, 2006.

22 See, for example, "The Brains Business," The Economist, September 8, 2005.

23 William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).

24 Lois Romano, "Urban Colleges Learn to Be Good Neighbors; Universities Also Reap Benefits from Investing in Their Communities," The Washington Post, January 9, 2006, late ed.: A1. And, David J. Maurrasse, Beyond the Campus; How Colleges and Universities Form Partnerships with Their Communities (New York and London: Routledge, 2001).

25 Nancy Cantor, Universities and Their Connected Communities: Creating Capital for the Future, Presidential Lecture Series, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute/University, March 6, 2006.

26 Imagining America, at http://www.ia.umich.edu.

27 KeyBank Press Release on the Diversity Thought Leadership Series at the Cleveland City Club, 1/11/2005.

28 For further information on Women Transcending Boundaries, see http://www.wtb.org.

29 For further information on the Community-Wide Dialogues, see http://www.irccny.org.

30 For further information on Syracuse University's inter-group dialogue curriculum, see http://cstl.syr.edu.

31 Ibid, p. 259.

32 Ibid, p. 260.