An ambitious project to identify and seize economic opportunities in southern Minnesota sought advice Friday from hundreds of southern Minnesota leaders from the public and private sectors.

Using hand-held voting devices, 250 participants winnowed six key industries to three: bioscience, health care and renewable energy. It’s in these areas the region has the best resources and opportunity to create jobs, they agreed.

The wider process is called the Southern Minnesota Regional Competitiveness Project, led by the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation.

Friday’s meeting at Minnesota State University was called the Futures Summit. It included a politicians forum and talks by Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

Pawlenty said jobs are the key to Minnesota’s quality of life, and low taxes and regulation are the ways to entice businesses to start and come here.

“There’s a lot of nostalgia in Minnesota for the way things were,” he said. “This is not the 1970s.”

And the state’s answer then — higher taxes and more government spending — will now serve to “price ourselves out of the market,” Pawlenty said.

A big part of the answer, then, is a productive, skilled and educated work force.

“We’re not the biggest, we’re not the cheapest, we better be the smartest,” he said.

Next up was Margaret Anderson Kelliher, speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives and a Mankato native.

“This is not the southern Minnesota of the 1970s,” she said. No one here is looking back, Kelliher said.

After her address, she said the best economic strategy takes advantage of home-grown entrepreneurs, who are looking at a range of factors, not just tax breaks.

“Relocation is a bit of the Old World of economic development,” she said.

Both Klobuchar, currently the state’s only senator, and Rep. Tim Walz touted the recently passed $787 billion stimulus bill as promoting similar goals.

Walz acknowledged the bill essentially borrows from the future and said he doesn’t like deficit spending.