A New York Times best-selling author is coming back to Charleston, his hometown, later this month to speak at the annual David C. Hardesty Jr. Festival of Ideas.
Alec Ross, who last year authored the highly acclaimed "The Industries of the Future," will impart to the people of Charleston some of the wisdom he's gathered after four years of circumnavigating the world as a senior adviser for innovation to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
In his book, Ross tries to answer the question "what will the next big industry be?"
The next industry won't be an old-fashioned factory job. Ross predicts that the next big industries will be centered around fields like robotics, genomics or coded money.
In his speech later this month, Ross said he wants to highlight some of West Virginia's assets and how the state's leaders might be able to ride the wave of globalization to increased prosperity.
Ross now lives in Baltimore with his wife and three kids, but he was born and raised right here in the heart of Appalachia.
In the beginning of the book, readers are introduced to a younger Ross, fresh out of his first year of college at Northwestern University. When his college friends took flashy internships in the political world, Ross took a job at the Charleston Civic Center cleaning up after concerts.
"There is no shame in these jobs, but there is great shame for society and its leaders when a life is made less than what it could be because of a lack of opportunity," Ross wrote on the final pages of the book. "The obligation of those in positions of power and privilege is to shape our policies to extend the opportunities that will come with the industries of the future to as many people as possible."
Ross has been named one of the "Top 100 Global Thinkers" by Foreign Policy Magazine and one of Huffington Post's "10 Game Changers in Politics."
"Growing up, I thought that life in West Virginia was representative of life everywhere," Ross wrote. "You were doing your best to manage a slow descent. But the phenomenon I was witnessing in West Virginia really made sense to me only as I traveled the world and saw other regions rising as West Virginia was failing."
Ross said that while other states have been able to shift away from manual labor industries to information industries, West Virginia has not. Ross said it isn't enough for someone to go back to school, earn a degree in an emerging field and go on to earn a good middle-class wage. Before that can happen, the state would need to embrace new industries.
West Virginia University's David C. Hardesty Jr. Festival of Ideas, which is free and open to the public, will be 7:30 p.m. March 23 in the Maier Performance Hall of the Clay Center for the Arts and Sciences. A book signing will follow.
The event is co-sponsored by the Charleston Gazette-Mail.