Chris, this audio blog hit me close to home. I live in Greenville,SC which at one time was known as the textile capital of the world. Now almost all of those textile mills are abandoned or burned down but thankfully some are being restored into very nice living spaces, probably like the place you are living.

I think of a lot of the same things you do as I drive by the old mills and through the mill villages. I actually like to take those routes as opposed to the faster bypasses. A lot of those mills lost out to cheaper labor overseas but I often wonder if the real loss has to do when they did the same thing all the time and didn’t really innovate.

My parents grew up in the mill villages and I hear great stories about how vibrant the communities were, unfortunately the depended on on industry. Thankfully Greenville has seen a great revival in the business sector. BMW and Michelin have great presense here and the Upstate of SC is really becoming one of the “tech centers” of the Southeast.

I’m thankful as a business owner that I have both good and bad models of innovation to look to in order to learn.