Imagine for a moment that you are looking out over a room full of the biggest movers and shakers in the Indiana economy. Mayors, corporate titans, and power brokers from cities large and small sit before you, waiting for you to tell them what they need to do to reinvigorate the state's economy.  What do you say?

Most of us know the results we'd like to see. An end to reports of jobs going away in 500 and 1,000 job chunks would be a good place to start.  Let's have stories instead about job gains of equal size.  And stories about companies moving their headquarters to Indiana, instead of the other way around. We'd like to see the kind of growth in our communities that would let our children find viable careers closer to home.  And if the value of our homes and property went up a little faster, that wouldn't be too bad either.

That's the easy part.  How we get there is another matter.  Let's study the options.

One possibility is that we do nothing.  Or, more precisely, we do nothing different.  Our public officials continue to promote the state's advantages, as they always have, and public institutions -- schools, governments, taxing agencies -- operate as they do today. Business leaders continue to focus on their own company's performance.

That's not quite as bad as it sounds.  After all, no matter how many Indiana leaders you pack into a room, they can no more control the economy around us than a surfer can control a wave. The fate of the Indiana economy will ultimately be determined by millions of decisions made today and in the future by workers, managers, and owners of capital, both at home and abroad.

But suppose we don't like the way those decisions are turning out.  Can we do something about it?  History is full of examples of far-sighted civic leaders crafting strategies and taking risks that helped their communities prosper.  Until New York built the Erie Canal, that city played second fiddle to Philadelphia.  And in more modern times, the establishment of Research Triangle in North Carolina in the 1960's helped transform what was then a backward, tobacco-dominant economy into a high tech leader.

But the failures of bets taken by some other, less fortunate cities, have been equally spectacular.  Indiana in the 1830's went bankrupt speculating on railroads and canals. In the 1970's, my hometown of Flint, Michigan, wasted millions trying to turn itself into a tourist destination with an ill-advised automobile theme park.  How we avoid their fate?

The answer, I believe, lies in a solid understanding of at least two things.  The first is where the general patterns of economic growth are taking us.  I am not smart enough to tell you whether or not life sciences, nanotechnology, or fuel cells will boom or bust in the coming decades.  But I do know that the economy has been transforming before our eyes, from mass production to what might be called mass specialization. 

By this I mean the production of very specialized products that are tightly bundled with an array of services.  Your car still has four tires and a gas pedal, but you may buy and sell it through an electronic broker, you track it with a GPS, and you pipe entertainment into it with a satellite radio. The jobs, the growth, and the profit, have increasingly been in the latter.

We also have to understand what the role of the public sector should be in facilitating economic growth.  We cannot expect our public leaders to behave like swashbuckling capitalists, placing bets on the future in individual companies, industries, or technologies.  But we can and should expect them to look ahead to anticipate the demands growth patterns will place on our schools, our infrastructure, and our public institutions, and make sure they are up to the task.

We're not quite there yet in Indiana.  We are a mass production-oriented economy with an aversion to risk sailing into an uncertain future of new, unfamiliar demands.  We can and should expect our leaders to get our schools, public institutions, and our tax structure in shape to meet the challenge.