Economic Gardening: Using Information to Help Your Entrepreneurs Grow

by Christian Gibbons, Director of Business/Industry Affairs, City of Littleton, Colorado

In addition to its economic gardening program, the city of Littleton, Colorado, considers quality-of-life infrastructure — such as parks, trails, and festivals like that shown above — to be integral to the city’s economic development strategy.

Entrepreneurs create jobs and wealth, not economic developers. From this realization, an entrepreneurial approach to economic development called “economic gardening” was created in Littleton, Colorado, over 20 years ago. Since that time, the city of Littleton has not spent a penny on incentives, while the number of jobs has doubled (from 15,000 to 30,000); sales tax revenues have tripled (from $6 million to $20 million); and the city’s population grew 23 percent.

How did we do it? A look at the context in which the program originated would be a good place to start.

Born in a crisis

In 1987, Littleton was in a recession due to the oil bust. Martin Marietta Aerospace, the community’s major employer, also laid off several thousand employees that year. Nearly a million square feet of commercial space was vacant, and the downtown vacancy rate was approaching 30 percent. The Littleton city council, concerned about the lack of local power over the community’s future, directed city staff “to work with local businesses to develop good jobs.” From that simple charge, we set out on a journey to discover how to build an entrepreneurial economy, thereon focusing all our efforts on helping local companies grow. Early on, the city made several significant policy changes:

1. We quit recruiting, cold turkey. In retrospect, it was the most productive change we made. During the 1970s and early to mid-1980s, we focused on recruitment and 4,000 jobs were created. In the following 18 years, 15,000 jobs were created – nearly four times the previous rate, and during a time period that included two recessions.

2. We were no longer concerned about being a low-cost place to do business.We were not interested in businesses that would move out as soon as the standard of living started to rise or the incentives ran out.We were a community with a highly paid workforce, scarce and valuable land and a moderate (but not low) tax rate. Our focus shifted to innovative knowledge companies that would create new wealth.

3. After much discussion, we concluded that the only real choice a community had was to grow its own entrepreneurs, or try to get other communities’ entrepreneurs to come in and save them.We chose the former as a smarter, more sustainable approach.

4. We then set out to identify the role of the public sector. Over the years, we have identified at least three legitimate roles: information, infrastructure and connections. From these roles, the economic gardening program was born, which is run by the city of Littleton’s Business/Industry Affairs Department.

Providing competitive information to high-growth companies

This article focuses primarily on the information component of economic gardening – which also constitutes the majority of the program – but the infrastructure and connections pieces deserve brief mention. Building infrastructure is a typical part of the public sector’s responsibility, and as a city, we construct streets, water lines and sewer lines. However, we also provide quality-of-life infrastructure (including parks, trails in every major drainage channel, downtown beautification, river preservation) and intellectual infrastructure (working with colleges and universities to create courses and training programs), which we consider to be key to economic development as well.

Connections are not simply after-hours networking meetings. For us, it is more structured activities such as “Peerspectives,” a CEO-to-CEO roundtable for growth companies. Research has shown that CEOs of high-growth companies prefer to learn from other CEOs who are experiencing growth issues.We also connect industry with academia in organizations like the Colorado Center for Information Technologies.

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