With the final failure of LTV soon upon us, no community leader can fail to recognize the need for our region to reinvent its economy. How we reinvent it is the difficult question we now must face. The most extraordinary period of economic growth that the United State has ever seen has more or less just passed us by. During the past eight years of this national growth spurt, the story was largely the opposite for Ohio. The rate of job creation in Ohio has lagged behind the national average for the last six years. Absent a direct, bold and well-funded multidimensional approach, the state and its urban regions will continue in a slow decline.

The facts are obvious. LTV is largely done for locally. TRW may be packing its bags for a speedy departure. Cleveland largely missed the technology revolution of the past decade. The only good news is that the issue is now under open discussion and debate. Recognizing the deficiencies of our local regional economy is a good starting point. So too is an inventory of our positive economic resources. This process appears to have begun. While the Governor’s current $1.6 billion proposal for high-tech spending appears to be on the slender side of commitment, it does represent recognition by Ohio policy-makers that we have now begun to lag woefully behind.

Clearly, we all understand the necessity to reinvent the economy for the 21st Century, but how do we get beyond the buzzwords of “bio-tech”, “high-tech” and “leveraging our existing strengths”. How do we get real and make it happen? How do you reinvent a declining economy? Finding the bottom is only the starting point. For one thing, we have failed to identify key technologies to develop that would garner strong support from NASA, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy and their allied private sector partners. More importantly, our leaders have lost any true vision of what the economy in Ohio should look like in the future. Our largest deficit is the fabled “vision-thing”. This is particularly exemplified by recent press comments that argue that the biotech industry is too small of a segment of our local economy to have any real impact on jobs. Well, the same argument certainly could have been madee with respect to the automobile industry in 1902 and would have proven equally wrong. We cannot afford to ignore the future..

Our leaders and our electorate must develop a vision that can delineate the future direction of growth for not just the next 10 years as Governor Taft suggests, but the next 50 to 100 years. We need to champion and, where necessary, to create from scratch scientific research institutions that will be able to compete at nothing less than world-class levels. Imagine a vision of Ohio as home to literally dozens of world-class institutes whose primary missions would be to do nothing less than to “mine” global research and technology for commercialization in Ohio. Over the past 50 years, Ohio has built a remarkable highway infrastructure-an infrastructure that would have seemed futuristic in 1950. The vision argued for here is certainly not more difficult than what we as a State have already achieved in transportation. Indeed, the vision that I suggest is probably substantially less expensive that what we’ve already spent on highways. Without a vision of magnitude and scale for the future of the region and for Ohio, we face a stagnant forecast with further job loss, higher unemployment, lower-wage jobs, and a continuing out-migration of our best talent and strongest enterprises.

Other States serve as true models of what can be accomplished. North Carolina made a commitment in the mid-Sixties not dissimilar from what I am suggesting and now an industrialized State like Ohio lags behind this formerly rural corner of the South in research and development and its applied applications to industry. Ohio leaders have been too focused on the status quo for too long. They have lost all long-term perspective and clearly lack a vision that Ohio might enjoy a true degree of greatness. Without this perspective, vision and a commitment to world-class excellence, Ohio will drift along in the middle rank of States continuing to export our talent, our jobs and our wealth to others. Our leaders possess the power to create an economic infrastructure in this State second to none. It is time they did so. A true commitment to support our existing research institutions and the clear political will to create dozens of new centers of research excellence would be any easy place to start for the reinvention of the economy.

Mark Kindt is a practicing attorney and entrepreneur who has bootstrapped two start-ups in Northeast Ohio -- a global translation agency and a pioneering Internet service provider. He is former Regional Director of the Federal Trade Commission.