And the key message they’re pushing is a familiar one: collaboration is key.

In one of its first steps, NorTech last year created a directory of 450-plus entities across a 21-county region that fall under the advanced-energy umbrella, including utilities, manufacturers and researchers.

NorTech’s immediate goal is to help these disparate entities come together and grow. Ultimately, it would like to see advanced-energy clusters, where talent and technology that’s unique worldwide give Northeast Ohio a competitive advantage.

“The idea is to have a lot of the elements that are needed in close proximity, so when companies decide to move, they go to areas of activity,” said Dave Karpinski, who leads Energy Enterprise. “You accelerate the innovation cycle when you’re close together.”

The Democratic Governors Association filed a complaint yesterday against Fox News with the Ohio Elections Commission, saying the network improperly aided former Fox News personality and Republican gubernatorial candidate John Kasich.

During Kasich’s Aug. 18 appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s show, Fox News ran Kasich’s campaign Web address at the bottom of the screen for about 1 minute and 30 seconds, the complaint says.

The Democratic Governors Association cited two apparent violations of Ohio law: A prohibited in-kind contribution in the form of free political advertising, and failure to include a proper disclaimer for the political advertising. The complaint says Kasich raised more than $21,000 from the appearance, citing an Aug.21 speech that Kasich made in Cincinnati, where he reportedly said, “The other night, I was on a show with a man who always gives you the last word, Bill O’Reilly. And I said, if you want to help my campaign, our campaign, and you have any extra nickels or pennies, send them to us. In the next 21 hours, we received over $21,000.”

Over the past five years, the emphasis on cultivating a “green economy” has sharpened, particularly as other nations have made it a priority while the United States has lagged behind. That has begun to change in recent years, and in no state has that been more true than Ohio.

Now, a company that epitomizes that which politicians from both sides of the political spectrum have envisioned for our economy’s future has begun to blossom.

Based in a Columbus suburb, “eCycle” takes cellular phones and batteries, recycles and/or reconfigures them and sells them for profit.

The young company’s revenues have increased 400% in the past three years, to $3.5 million in 2009; and their efforts in 2010 will keep 1.2 million cell phones, or 200 tons of waste, out of landfills.

What’s equally encouraging is that the company’s prospects for future growth are strong enough that the eCycle intends to add 60-plus employees by 2011.

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His latest post considers the hurdles Democrats are facing in November, and how they got to this point over the past few months:

There is reason to be skeptical of two types of analyses: those that claim that Factor X definitely isn’t contributing to the Democrats’ troubles, and those that assert that it definitely is. For instance, I’d urge some caution in reading this article at Real Clear Politics by Jay Cost — which rightly critiques those who have entirely dismissed the role that health care played in the Democrats’ decline, but probably goes too far in trying to argue the contrary. Mr. Cost is right, for instance, that the Democrats’ polling decline was steepest during last summer, when health care began to be debated — but when one delves in a little deeper, the timing of the sharpest periods of decline do not line up very well with specific events in the health care debate.

Does that mean Mr. Cost is wrong? Not at all. Health care dominated the political discourse for about nine months; it seems implausible that it hasn’t played some role. But he hasn’t offered much in the way of proof — nor is there much of it to be had: overdetermined phenomena usually beget underdetermined attempts to explain them.

And now General Electric has asked them to look into why wind turbine foundations sometimes fail despite their brawny composition.

GE, the nation’s largest wind turbine manufacturer, has an agreement with the Lake Erie Energy Development Corp. to supply 225-ton turbines for LEEDCo’s pilot project.

The plan is to build a five-turbine wind farm about seven miles out in the lake by the end of 2012, and then expand it over the next 15 years with hundreds of turbines, creating a new Northeast Ohio industry in the process.

“I know from having been in the sports business so long that stadium development takes a number of years,” Hunt said. “You need to think about what the next step is.”

Located on the state-owned Ohio Expo Center fairgrounds, Crew Stadium once was the only stadium in Major League Soccer built solely for soccer. Today, nine of the league’s 16 venues are soccer-specific with more under development.

Crew President and General Manager Mark McCullers said Crew Stadium remains an iconic soccer site, but the team needs to look out five to 10 years for its facility needs. The club continues to seek a site for a new practice facility, possibly on Columbus’ suburban east side, he said, and it remains interested in finding a downtown location, especially in the Arena District, for a stadium.

McCullers also said the Crew is closely watching the Columbus Blue Jackets’ effort to improve its lease at Nationwide Arena through a possible public purchase of the privately owned venue. One of the financing scenarios under discussion is tapping tax revenue from the new Columbus casino to fund an arena buyout by Franklin County and the city.

“My message to those that have an ongoing interest in that,” McCullers said, “is we shouldn’t just fix the Blue Jackets’ situation but fix the professional sports infrastructure situation in Columbus. That includes us.”

Lost in the fray was the fact that the city is, in fact, evolving with the economic tide rather well, thanks in large part to collaboration between its civic and cultural strengths, the growth of one of the world’s top hospitals in the Cleveland Clinic, the research of Case Western University, and the innovative work of those at JumpStart Ventures.

The Wall Street Journal has taken notice, featuring JumpStart and some of its peers in this morning’s edition:

Tapping state and private funds, the group set out to create an environment to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. JumpStart Inc. is a centerpiece of that effort. It’s a nonprofit business accelerator providing entrepreneurs with financing and advice as well as promoting economic development initiatives and running outreach programs to encourage entrepreneurship.

Its venture capital unit, JumpStart Ventures, looks to finance technology, health-care and clean-technology companies at the earliest stages to get them to the point where they can attract money from angel investors and venture firms. JumpStart Ventures gets half its money from Ohio’s Third Frontier economic development initiative and half in matching grants, primarily from foundations in Ohio. It doesn’t invest for financial returns. “Follow-on funding is our key metric that we look at,” said JumpStart Ventures President Rebecca Braun.

As a measure of JumpStart’s success, she said that her venture group has invested $16.5 million in almost 50 companies since its launch in 2004, and those companies so far have raised about $120 million in follow-on rounds.

One of the companies JumpStart backed in 2006, CardioInsight Technologies Inc., raised a $6 million Series B financing earlier this year from prior investors Case Technology Ventures and Draper Triangle Ventures. The Cleveland-based company, which was started in 2005 by two doctoral students at Case Western Reserve University, is developing cardiac-mapping technology.