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USM’s MCBER Wins Award for Excellence in Economic Development Research

December 21, 2007

The Maine Center for Business and Economic Research (MCBER) at the University of Southern Maine won an Award of Excellence for their long-term evaluation of grants issued by the Maine Technology Institute (MTI). MCBER is a joint center of the USM School of Business and USM Muskie School of Public Service. It conducts research and provides technical assistance to Maine’s private and public economic sectors.

The Best Practice Award of Excellence was presented to MCBER by the national University Economic Development Association (UEDA), which annually holds a competition for its members to recognize outstanding initiatives in economic development. UEDA is dedicated to serving the nation’s institutions of higher education and their economic development affiliates. It focuses on policy, practice, and partnerships that enhance the relationship between higher education and economic development.

For the past five years, MCBER has conducted an evaluation of the effectiveness of grant programs administered by MTI. The evaluation project examined the results of over 500 grants to 340 recipients, totaling $15.5 million in state funding. MCBER won the award in Economic Research Development based on its original approach to this evaluation. First, the research method is designed to collect data repeatedly over an indefinite time span, rather than base results on a single year of research. Second, it uses a questionnaire that adapts yearly to each grant-recipient’s funding profile, to each type of grant, and to changes in MTI programs themselves.

Director of MCBER, Bruce Andrews, a School of Business professor, notes that MCBER’s new approaches to program evaluation and data gathering addresses the economic research needs in Maine’s future. In a 2006 report on Maine’s economy, issued by the Washington, D.C. Brookings Institute, it was determined that Maine doesn’t thoroughly monitor research on economic development over a substantial span of time. MCBER’s MTI evaluation is one of Maine’s most detailed and longitudinally maintained evaluations of any economic development program, says Andrews.

Andrews and Associate Director of MCBER, Charles Colgan, a Muskie School professor, collaborated on the project. Andrews says MCBER is strong in forecasting and has recently built a forecasting system for Hannaford Bros. to predict sales, customer traffic, and items for several departments in each of their 150 supermarkets. It has also recently prepared traffic volume forecasts for the Maine Turnpike Authority. Besides the MTI evaluation and these two forecasting projects, MCBER executed 12 other external technical assistance projects from July 2006 to June 2007. In 2008, there are plans to continue emphasizing forecasting and program-evaluation projects.

For more information on MCBER, visit http://www.usm.maine.edu/cber/index.html.

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