Welcome to our site! We hope you will come and visit often. We will post considered and thoughtful insights regarding our community on a regular basis. Your comments are always welcomed.

This first post should leave you with the impression that we are serious people dealing with big issues. We have decided to share with you our perspective on macro forces facing our businesses, regions and communities and practical strategies, techniques, and technologies to address them. In these challenging times we see opportunity in bold actions.

Our corporate name, Magnale, is a Latin word, literally translated as “great things; mighty works, deeds, words”. Magnale has a unique tag line, “Powering Democratic Commerce”. Magnale’s definition is … practicing, advocating, and promoting the common commercial interests of mid-market business and their people through regional technology infrastructure. Among the factors that led to this choice was the wide marketing versatility of the phrase and its flexibility for communicating Magnale’s vision, mission, and strengths. It identifies Magnale as a leader holding the belief that prudent and practical commerce is the most effective driver behind democratic policy and regional agenda formulation and competitiveness.

This name and tag line is where we find our inspiration for our work. We understand that the U.S. may indeed be achieving high levels of employment in a time of fairly strong economic growth, but the decisions made by many businesses, regions, and metropolitan areas are concurrently diminishing quality of life for their citizens. Most U.S. regional and metropolitan economies, even large ones, still see getting bigger as the main goal of economic and community development. Decades-old policies that define growth as merely “more jobs and more people” have resulted in urban sprawl, traffic congestion, poor air quality, rising housing prices, and a shortage of skilled workers. In fast-growing regions, such problems are making it difficult for companies to recruit employees and for city governments to hire managers, administrators, teachers, police, and fire fighters. These problems are worse, and politically more urgent, in metropolitan regions that are growing at a dramatic rate, such as Atlanta, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Seattle.

We think this situation calls for regional business, economic, and community leaders to do great things: to produce mighty works, deeds, and words that emphasize the quality of jobs they bring to their regions, more than the quantity of jobs. Better-quality jobs provide higher wages, employ more-educated workers, emphasize the importance of overall quality of life, and contribute to a high-and-rising standard of living for each employee and the community-at-large. Success in economic development should ultimately be measured by an increasing average per-capita household income. In a word, it makes more sense to strive for economic prosperity, not just economic growth.

Our intent with this blog, through a series of posts, is to create a contextual framework of understanding for our community as we apply and integrate technologies within our technology infrastructure. To this end we have adopted the definition of four categories of technology which embody significant public good elements:

• Emerging technologies that entail high risk and long gestation periods but create new markets with significant wealth creation potential;
• Systems technologies that provide infrastructure to many product and service technologies and thereby drive growth in major economic sectors;
• Enabling or multi-use technologies which benefit multiple segments of an industry or group of industries, but encounter economies of scope and diffusion investment barriers;
• Infra-technologies which leverage investment in both development and use of proprietary technologies, but require distinct competencies to develop and common ownership (such as defacto standards) to effectively use.

Our purpose is to solicit and act upon your insights and to collectively serve the public good. We welcome you on this journey with us. Your first contribution is to comment on these technology definitions and whether or not they make sense to you?

Please listen to my Podcast below.

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