East Lansing-based Anderson Economic Group offered some provocative reform nuggets in policy papers drafted for the recent West Michigan Regional Policy Conference. While the conference focused much business wrath toward taxes and Big Labor, the policy papers contained numerous reform and transformation projects elsewhere that are worth consideration in Michigan.

Three examples:

Functional Consolidation of Government Units. Business and philanthropic groups recently banded together to exampine the cost of local government in 16 Ohio counties to identify duplicated services. Check out the report. And Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland is encouraging collaboration through competitive grants to local governments.

Attracting and Retaining Millenials. Philadelphia has used tobacco settlement money to build a bio-science incubator that has led to 400 locally based life science companies and a related uptick in young professional employment. So has Cleveland.

Benchmarking University Operations. Concerned with rising tuition costs, Ohio has ordered a two-year public university tuition freeze and pushed all state universities to participate in the a nationwide campus benchmarking system called the Voluntary System of Accountability. (Five of Michigan's 15 universities take part, including CMU, MSU, and WMU.)