Calabash, NC, August 16, 2013 –(PR.com)– The State Science Technology Institute (SSTI), has invited Thomas E. Vass, a North Carolina regional economist, based in Calabash, to address their national conference on September 16, 2013, in Portland, Oregon.
SSTI, based in Westerville, Ohio, is one of the nation’s largest and most prominent organizations dedicated to encouraging economic growth through the application of science and technology. It provides the nation’s most comprehensive set of resources for promoting technology-based economic development.
Vass will address the conference on the topic of how crowdfunding can be integrated into a regional economic development strategy. His paper is titled “How Economic Developers Can Fill The Crowdfunding Capital Market Gaps In Regional Innovation Ecosystems: Economic Developers Can Manage The Regional Deal Flow Pipeline.” An excerpt of the paper is available for free at the Crowdsourcing.org website.
“I am delighted to have a chance to talk to members of SSTI about a topic that has motivated me since 1974, when I first wrote about the difference between industrial recruitment and technology based economic development,” said Vass. “Except back then, I did not know the right term to describe technology based economic development.”
“I believe that professional economic developers can easily incorporate crowdfunding into their regional economic growth strategies if they will work towards creating the entire private capital market infrastructure that funds private companies in their home communities,” said Vass.
“If small private technology companies can survive to age 10, and get a small slug of growth capital on their 10th birthdate, their rates of job creation will be exponential and the regional rates of economic growth will be explosive,” Vass noted.
About Thomas E. Vass: http://ssticonference.org/speaker/thomas-vass/
Vass is a regional economist with a research interest in the relationship between regional technological innovation, regional capital markets and regional economic growth. He is the author or Predicting Technology: Identifying Future Market Opportunities and Disruptive Technologies (Wingspan Press, 2007). He is a registered investment advisor, and his investment management work involves a commercial application of the Feser Technology Cluster methodology to selecting technology stocks for investment portfolios and identifying private capital investments in regional economies. He is the holder of a patent on technology stock selection, and the manager of a subscription based equity crowdfunding website, The Private Capital Market. He graduated with a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has a Masters of Regional Planning, also from UNC–CH. He is located in Calabash, North Carolina.