Economic Gardening: Using Information to Help Your Entrepreneurs Grow (cont.)

Not just another name for business retention

There are numerous business assistance programs, run by organizations from the SBA’s Small Business Development Centers to local chambers to city economic development offices. But we believe that several characteristics distinguish economic gardening from traditional business assistance programs:

• Growth, not movement: Both recruiting and business retention programs focus on movement – moving a business in or keeping a business from moving out. Economic gardening, on the other hand, is about tools and concepts that support entrepreneurial growth, not movement.

• Cutting-edge tools: Economic gardening uses high-level corporate tools that small businesses don’t typically use, or may not even know exist. It should be noted, however, that economic gardening is not the tools themselves; it is an approach to economic development through the support of entrepreneurial activity. The tools we use in our program today are not those that we started with 20 years ago and they will probably be different still in another 20 years.

• Cutting-edge theories: The business world is flooded with “flavor of the month” business concepts and new books with the latest examples of winning business strategies. Our focus, however, is fundamental theories that affect businesses, people and economies in all times and situations, not just this month. Visit our Web site, mentioned at the end of this article, for more information on how we incorporate leading thinking in areas such as complexity science, network theory, technology adoption curves and more into our work.

• Open source: Many people contribute to the conversation about an entrepreneurial economy. “Econ-dev” is an Internet mail list run by the City of Littleton for discussion about economic gardening. Over 600 participants use the list to debate ideas and theories, to uncover new research and to post requests for help from other professionals. Like the computer operating system Linux, the value of an “open source” idea is distributed intelligence. Many people are working on the problems and issues of an entrepreneurial economy and are constantly contributing better tools and theories.

• Best practices: How do we make sure we are using the best cutting-edge tools without opening up the entire program for every ephemeral idea that comes along? Under the best practices concept, there is a certain amount of seasoning that must occur before newer ideas enter the arena. At the same time, best practices allow necessary adaptation to changing markets, ideas and tools, and keeps economic gardening from ossifying.

• Entrepreneurial organization: In economic gardening, the support organization must reflect the entrepreneurial companies with which they work. Both are fast and innovative, quality conscious and customer-service driven. In picking staff for an economic gardening operation, passion for entrepreneurship is the overriding factor.

When it comes to growing jobs, economic gardening may not be the right approach for every community. But in 20 years of developing the concept and putting it into practice, economic gardening has grown an impressive track record of success in Littleton, and we see more and more communities using the approach to foster the development of high-growth companies. By no means have we solved the economic development riddle, but we are confident that two things – increasing connections and the flow of information to growing entrepreneurial companies – are key.

More information about economic gardening is available on the City of Littleton Web site at www.littletongov.org/bia/economicgardening/default.asp. Note the list of databases and GIS datasets, and the “Free and Low-Cost Resources” PDF document.

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