In advance of the March 17th delivery of a National Broadband Plan to Congress, mandated as part of the Recovery Act, the Federal Communications Commission has released a mound of useful data this month. Last week, at an event hosted by Brookings, Chairman Genachowski presented the results of a consumer survey on attitudes towards broadband and views on how to improve access for all. Some major

America continues to grope toward the development of an effective innovation strategy as part of a credible push toward economic reinvention. Notably, in September President Obama--through a solid white paper and a good Troy, N.Y. speech--articulated a bona fide plan for catalyzing the development and commercialization of mold-breaking new products and processes essential to staving off further economic decline.

So now comes the next juncture: Congress’ final deliberations on the creation of a new regional industry clusters program.

Congressional approval of an adequately funded clusters effort is critical because the nation’s economic recovery and longer-term revitalization hinge on restoring the economic health of its regions, metropolitan and rural.

Clusters matter because networks of interconnected, geographically concentrated businesses and related entities in a particular field have been shown, as we have noted previously, to deliver substantial economic benefits to firms and industries by facilitating accelerated knowledge sharing, enhanced access to specialized labor and suppliers, and substantial economies of scale.

President Obama gave a good speech yesterday in Troy, N.Y. that nicely linked the renewal of fading manufacturing centers like Troy to the implementation of the administration’s emerging national innovation strategy.

 All through his remarks, the president did well to situate how national policy drift has left communities like Troy “dealing with what amounts to almost a permanent recession for years” and how a concerted national innovation strategy points the way to revitalization.

It’s too bad, then, that Obama did not mention in his speech (though it’s in the accompanying white paper) a particularly relevant new idea gaining traction in the administration and its Commerce Department that would have the federal government invest modestly in the enhancement of regional industry clusters--networks of interconnected, geographically concentrated businesses in the same industries.

Along these lines, the president’s budget requested $50 million in planning and matching grants for Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) “to support the creation of regional innovation clusters that leverage regions’ existing competitive strengths to boost job creation and economic growth.” Grants would be allocated on a competitive basis to local governments or non-profits to support initiatives in knowledge-sharing, workforce training, or marketing. The idea holds considerable promise and is drawn from a large body of economic and business literature, as well as a report we released in April of 2008.

President Obama spoke today at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, N.Y. and sought to assemble a variety of stimulus and other administration initiatives--community college funding, information technology (IT) initiatives, clean energy investments, advanced vehicle development programs--into a true plan for long-term economic revitalization through innovation.

And yet that’s unfair: “Sought to assemble” sounds snarky, but today’s speech and associated white paper actually pull a variety of disparate efforts into what comes close to resembling a true “national innovation strategy” such as we have been urging for several years be developed.

Welcome here, after a decade of drift, is a sharp critique of the “bubble-driven” growth of the recent past combined with Obama’s insistence that in transforming America into an innovation nation “government has a key role to play”:

A modern, practical approach recognizes both the need for the government to lay the foundations for innovation and the hazards of overzealous government intervention