What If?
What If?
Imagine what would happen if we tried these innovative strategies for diversifying our economy. By Kim Cartlidge
What if we earmarked a penny of our bed tax and invested it in capital projects like the Red Sox Stadium?
That’s what
Since then the city has spent $9 million to build a soccer complex, a downtown park with performance stages, an art museum, a bonsai garden and a health adventure attraction. Its John B. Lewis Soccer complex adds to the city’s parks infrastructure while attracting tournaments that draw up to 16,000 visitors each.
But a community investment doesn’t have to be targeted only to tourists.
What if we thought regionally and partnered with the
High Tech Corridor?
Then we might attract those sexy, high-tech entrepreneurs who act like magnets for more of their kind. And get this:
The corridor stretches across the middle of the state and encompasses three major universities (
Companies love the corridor, which gives them access to the state’s brightest minds through its Matching Grants Research program, through which labs at UF, UCF and USF test new products and applications. In its 12-year history, the program has funded more than 800 research projects.
And the marketing dollars are already there. The corridor, along with its Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development Councils, spends $400,000 annually on advertising, trade shows and events, touting the destination to companies around the country. The corridor council also invests in workforce development programs. Locally, it developed the IT Security Associates degree program in partnership with
What if we started a business incubator?
Sometimes a company needs a little nurturing before it flies solo. Incubators work with inventors or entrepreneurs to provide management, marketing and financial expertise, low-cost space and administrative help in the initial, vulnerable stages.
Again, the Florida High Tech Corridor plays a role. Randy Berridge, the president of Corridor Council, says the cost of funding an incubator varies, but the council and a university can match the dollars communities raise. Among
with a reported gross regional product of $85 million.
This hasn’t been lost on
What if we took our business and government leaders to see what other cities are doing to diversify?
So maybe your idea of a fun trip doesn’t include trolling for economic development ideas in
What happens after a site visit? Economic development officials, businesspeople and politicians experience what’s worked elsewhere and bring the most promising ideas home. An important side effect is relationship-building. It’s much easier to make a phone call to someone—whether it’s a politician who holds the purse strings or a wealthy business booster—when you’ve spent hours on a bus together.
In
The visit to
What if we spent way more money on tourism marketing?
Sure, it might seem like ending at the beginning, since
Our quality of life is a big draw for entrepreneurs, whether they choose to move large manufacturing operations, or, as is more common, decide to reinvent themselves and create a balanced life of work and play.
The Lee County Visitor and Convention Bureau funds marketing with its five percent tourist tax, while both
And finally, what if we paid more attention to our existing companies instead of trying to recruit new ones?
The concept is called economic gardening, and it’s been spreading across the country to different communities. (Our local economic development officials are familiar with it and have already begun to focus more on existing companies.) The concept originated in Littleton, Colo., which had lost 7,000 jobs in the late 1980s when major employer Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) cut back its operations. At the same time, 1 million square feet of commercial space was already vacant, evidence that existing economic development strategies weren’t working. The Littleton City Council (littletongov.org) directed staff to cultivate existing business and locally based jobs, boldly abandoning efforts to recruit new companies to town.
The city’s economic gardening program is based on the research of economist David Birch, who was the first to identify entrepreneurial “gazelles”—the 3 percent to 5 percent of rapid-growth small businesses that create the greatest number of new jobs in any community.
The city spends about $60,000 of its $620,000 economic development budget on a marketing database and offers any company in the city free access to its “competitive intelligence,” which includes industry trends, market reports, legislative research and management training. A GIS system plots psychographic, demographic and consumer expenditure information down to the individual household.
Since changing its emphasis to helping existing companies grow,
“The [old] policy wasn’t working for us,” says Gibbons. To recruit and compete with job creation offshore, “your standard of living has to keep dropping. We got out of that game. We haven’t recruited a business in 20 years.”