MANKATO — 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.

But doing nothing was a worse option, and the only way out of the recession is creating growth, Walz said.

Klobuchar said southern Minnesota already has a beacon of health-care efficiency in the Mayo Clinic. A Dartmouth study showed patients at the hospital system pay about half the copays of the UCLA Medical Center during the final two years of their life — without sacrificing the quality of care.

The politicians, of course, are only a small portion of the more than 500 people who have attended regional meetings for the project during the past six months.

John Monson, vice president of rural finance for AgStar Financial Services, said he’s not at a loss for biobusiness ideas; he’s seen five proposals that would together employ 1,000 people.

The government could help by providing loan guarantees, meaning the government would step in and pay back a loan if the borrower can’t pay it. This would reduce risk and result in lower interest rates.

Monson said the government offers this guarantee for finished products but not for startup companies,

“When you start something new, there’s a lot of risk,” he said.

The Futures Summit essentially brings to a close the information-gathering phase of the competitiveness project.

Researchers from the University of Missouri-Columbia have been hired to guide the project, and they’ll condense the guidance from the summit and regional meetings into a series of action steps, culminating in a May 15 meeting to discuss that plan.

Tim Penny, president and CEO of the Initiative Foundation, said the project isn’t about directing the market.

But the public, nonprofit and private sectors could be collaborating more closely, he said, and devoting their resources to the most promising areas for economic development.