How economic gardening nurtures local businesses

The year 1987 is one that most residents of Littleton, Colo.,
would rather forget. Their town’s largest employer, Martin Marietta,
eliminated 7,000 jobs—half the company’s local workforce and
about 20 percent of the town’s population. By year’s end, more than
1 million square feet of retail and offi ce space sat vacant.
Many towns would have taken the usual cure: attract another big
corporation to the area. But Chris Gibbons, Littleton’s newly hired
director of business/industry aff airs, was fed up with chasing footloose
companies. So, with support of the city council, he threw out
the economic development playbook that most cities and states
use. No longer would he hunt down big companies and lure them
back to Littleton with tax incentives and subsidized space.

Instead,
he would focus all of his his department’s efforts on growing hometown
businesses.

The only problem? Gibbons didn’t know how to grow hometown
businesses. Following a brainstorming session at a local think
tank, though, he did have a name for his endeavor: “economic gardening.” http://www.littletongov.org/bia/economicgardening/

After years of experimenting with economic gardening, he
has formulated a fertilizer that cities and states can use to cultivate
bumper crops of local businesses. First, they must identify the local
companies poised to grow the fastest and create the most jobs.

Then they have to act like business development offi ces and off er
high-end marketing, research, and development tools—the same
ones that are staples in most corporations but that the little guys
cannot aff ord or use on their own.

Gibbons’ strategy is paying off . Littleton has doubled its job base
and tripled its sales tax revenues over the last 20 years, far outpacing
locales throughout the Denver area and the nation. These
strong results are spurring cities and states across the country to
adopt economic gardening for themselves.

By Anne Stuhldreher

Full Report: http://www.ssireview.org/images/articles/2010WI_WhatWorks_GrowYourOwn.pdf

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Economic Gardening: http://matr.net/news.phtml?cat_id=75&catlabel=Economic+Gardening