National Leadership Through Regional Cooperation: How the Tennessee Valley is Coming Together to Create the Jobs of the Future

by Zach Wamp, U.S. Representative, Third Congressional District of Tennessee

Just as America’s predominantly agrarian economy once gave way to the new industrial age, our industrial and manufacturing base has been feeling increased pressures in recent years. These pressures are not only from foreign competition, but also from the emergence of entirely new industries driven by new discoveries in science and technology that few of us could have predicted even a few decades ago.

Even as business start-ups, business expansions, new jobs, salaries and wages are all on the rise, many of our communities are still feeling the pinch as they struggle to transform themselves for the economy of tomorrow.We in the Southeastern U.S., for instance, have painfully witnessed over the last few decades major industries such as textiles, apparel, shoes, furniture and other traditionally lower-skill, lowerwage manufacturing jobs slowly decline, with many moving permanently offshore.

At the same time, our communities and our citizens have worked hard to replace these departing industries with new and higher-paying careers in automotive assembly and supply operations, transportation and logistics, wireless communications and consumer entertainment, and of course, an explosion of new service industry jobs.

But as we know, the increasingly competitive global marketplace is never stagnant. If we are not careful, even some of our new industries could one day move overseas to more economically competitive regions. That is why we must constantly and aggressively put America’s superior technological talent and resources to work – to continuously innovate, invent and create the new industries and the new jobs of the future.

Linking regional assets

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) confers with Congressmen Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.) and Bud Cramer (D-Ala.) during one of the Tennessee Valley Corridor's regional economic summits in Chattanooga.

For the past 10 years, the Tennessee Valley Corridor, a multistate regional economic development effort that links North Alabama, East Tennessee, Southeast Kentucky and Southwest Virginia, has been working to do just that. The Corridor initiative regularly brings together our region’s top technology, business, government, education and economic development leaders to exchange ideas and formulate plans for technological advancement and economic growth in our region.

Thanks to the work of these hundreds of leaders and volunteers, we believe the Tennessee Valley Corridor is rapidly becoming what the late Dr. George Kozmetsky, founder of the prestigious IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, once termed a “technopolis” – a region where hightech investment drives new business creation and fuels economic growth.

When we first began our effort, the concept of connecting the science and technology assets of different communities and institutions within the Tennessee Valley – without regard to city, county or even state boundaries – was foreign to some. But we believe our focus on regionalism, collaboration and innovation has placed us on the leading edge of the same trend playing out from Silicon Valley in the west to the Research Triangle in the east.

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