About

Michigan Future, Inc. is a non-partisan, non-profit organization. Our mission is to be a source of new ideas on how Michigan can succeed as a world class community in a knowledge-driven economy. Its work is funded by Michigan foundations.

Our goal is to be a catalyst for recreating a high prosperity Michigan. A place with a per capita income above the national average in both national expansions and contractions. Its a status we enjoyed for most of the last century and now have entirely lost. In 2007 we were eleven percent below the national average in per capita income – our lowest ranking ever!

Our basic conclusion: What most distinguishes successful areas from Michigan is their concentrations of talent, where talent is defined as a combination of knowledge, creativity and entrepreneurship. In a flattening world where work can increasingly be done anyplace by anybody, the places with the greatest concentrations of talent win.

Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes magazine, summed it up best:

Best place to make a future Forbes 400 fortune? Start with this proposition: The most valuable natural resource in the 21st century is brains. Smart people tend to be mobile. Watch where they go! Because where they go, robust economic activity will follow.

At the core of Michigan’s decline is that we are thirty fourth in education attainment. Unless that improves, we will be one of the poorest states in the country. Quite simply, in a flattening world, economic development priority one is to prepare, retain and attract talent.

Michigan Future’s work is focused on:

Michigan Economy:  providing information and ideas on Michigan’s transition to a knowledge-based economy

Attracting and Retaining Talent: providing information and ideas on how Michigan can better retain and attract recent college graduates

Preparing Talent: working to create lots of new high schools through our Accelerator Program — starting in Detroit through our and its inner ring suburbs–that transform teaching and learning so as to prepare predominantly low-income minority students for college success.