What is your attitude towards failure?  It’s a strange sounding question.  Success is good, and failure is bad, right?  That seems pretty unambiguous.  But when it comes to economic development, business start-ups, or even professional sports teams, how we handle success and failure, both individually and as a community, can have a lot to do with our ultimate performance.

 Success seems to be measured very simply in professional football these days, and since the Indianapolis Colts aren’t going to make it to the Super Bowl this year, many are calling the boys in blue a failure.  That’s a little troubling.  Not just for the athletes’ or the coaches’ sake, but for what it says about us as a community.  If ours is a culture where those who fail are criticized and condemned, then fewer of us will be willing to take the risks that actions with potential rewards always face.

 The nice thing about failure, if there is anything nice about it, is that it provides you with good information.  Sports teams learn about weaknesses that higher quality opponents exploit.  Business entrepreneurs – who fail on average three or four times before they succeed – learn about themselves, about the marketplace, and about potential partners and competitors.  Those individuals who excel in business and in sports – and there’s more than a few who have done both – clearly learn from failures, perhaps better than the rest of us.

 And what about the rest of us?  Can there be such a thing as a community attitude towards risk and failure?  If so, is it a problem for Indiana?

 These are very relevant questions to be asking at this point in our economic development, because for many corners of the state, the safe option of simply continuing to harvest the fruits of past success – grown from seeds planted by risk-takers of an earlier generation -- is disappearing.  We’re a production-oriented state, with a higher fraction of our workforce employed by large companies than most other states, sailing into an economic future where growth in high paying jobs is coming from smaller and medium sized companies whose products can’t be physically weighed or measured.

 That’s forcing state and community leaders – the ones paying attention, at least – to think about new directions for growth, involving new kinds of commitments of public resources.  How will we judge them when they appear to fail, as they almost certainly shall?

 That question may soon be answered in central Indiana, where public and private sector leaders have charted a bold course to turn the state’s largest regional economy into a major player in the biotech industry.  It’s certainly a goal worth pursuing.  For one thing, it’s growing, and expected to keep growing.  For another, it’s a high-tech industry with lots of research and development spinoff to commercial products of all kinds.  And many of the jobs are very specialized, and pay very well.

 But is there really room for an Indianapolis – or any of the dozens of competitors vying for the same prize – to squeeze its way in amongst the handful of established players?  For the unpleasant truth is that in many of the high tech industries being coveted by so many states, the process of clustering has been drawing them more tightly around already existing geographic concentrations around the country instead of the reverse.  It’s a self-feeding cycle, where high R&D, startups, commercialization and venture capital activities seem to regenerate each other.

 It’s a tough game to win, to be sure, but you’ve got to be in it to have a chance.  We can only hope that leaders in other communities around the state muster the courage to stake out their own new roads to success, and that they and those who elect them understand and learn from the failures and setbacks along the way.