Welcome to the Atlanta Privately-held Companies IncBizNet blog! This forum will hopefully become a collective space where executives from privately held companies can talk about specific issues that affect their business. We can identify and understand emerging challenges to our competitiveness; we can generate new ideas and concepts that will help improve our competitiveness. Finally, we can forge new relationships and galvanize actions to translate policy into action and change. These are just few of the issues that I feel is worth considering.

But before we can begin, I’d like to introduce myself – your moderator – and Arete Media Associates, Inc., the company I work for. My name is Waylee George and I am a President/CEO for Arete Media Associates, Inc. We are a Privately-held Economic and Leadership Development Consulting firm, in Alpharetta, GA, with a focus on workforce development.  Consider this! America’s regions and communities face new challenges from our competitors around the world. Experts believe that competing in the global economy requires creating regional or community-based innovation ecosystems that drive growth and prosperity. They also believe that the challenge for us is to optimize our assets—human, capital, institutional and intangible—around the innovation imperative. The problem is many regions and communities have yet to fully understand the competitive value of their asset base. Only a few have actually implemented a systematic process to identify their innovation assets or developed strategies to ensure that these assets are sufficiently linked and leveraged. Arete Media Associates, Inc. has been committed to helping communities drive increased productivity for the past seven years. Through our thought leadership in federal and state innovation policy and our on-the-ground efforts to assist communities, Arete Media Associates, Inc. is poised to become a key partner in enhancing the value and reducing the burdens for the members of our communities. We’ve partnered, teamed, and/or collaborated with a variety of firms and agencies including Microsoft, Cisco systems, Oracle, US department of Labor, Georgia Department of Administrative Service, The Executive Office of Management & Budget, FSS Center for Acquisition Excellence, GSA ITSS, etc. We are committed to working with executives in this community through dialogue, collaboration, and strategic focus to help revitalize our economic position and increase our competitive edge. To begin our dialogue and discussion, I like to post the first question: What environmental/cultural/business factors are important to, or have an impact on, innovation in our community or region? Has this changed from the past?I encourage you to share your ideas and post thoughts of interest to you and the community at large. I’d like to continue this dialogue to help us identify and understand emerging challenges to competitiveness. Keeping our competitive position depends on our collective effort.  Please feel free to share openly about your business issues and topics of interest for us to read and discuss. I’ll be posting some serious questions as well as some fun questions in the coming days and weeks. So stay tuned….