Our economic garden – Three areas to concentrate on to attract the creative class and nurture innovators.

It’s been obvious that people dealing with economic-development issues in Fort Wayne and Allen County are heading in some new directions. They talk more these days about improving the quality of life than they do crafting incentives to lure a particular company. They emphasize infrastructure and seek ways to make the "creative class" happy. Innovation is much prized, and "gazelles" strongly encouraged.

By Leo Morris

for the editorial board

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/news/editorial/8632767.htm

What is less obvious to the casual observer is that all these new paths are part of a larger whole, a focused approach to development called "economic gardening" that tries to build the local economy from the inside out by stressing slow, painstaking community development.

Pioneered in Littleton, Colo., in 1987, economic gardening (as opposed to economic hunting) is based on research showing that the debate over whether to seek large companies or small companies is mostly pointless and counterproductive. Most jobs in most areas are created the fastest-growing companies (those gazelles), which, according Littleton’s Christian Gibbons, the founding father of economic gardening, are only about "3 to 5 percent of all companies."

Some companies (giants such as GM and IBM, for example) are so stable that they fear innovation, the real fuel for growth and thus jobs. Some are so chaotic that they disappear quickly. The gazelles exist on "the edge of chaos," where a rapid response to change causes many mistakes but contributes to a vibrant economy. The mistakes that accompany innovation, Gibbons’ studies led him to believe, are like earthquakes: "If you don’t have lots of little ones, you end up with a big one." Areas with lots of gazelles often seem turbulent — lots of business startups and lots of business deaths — but they’re also the communities that thrive.

Gazelles are led by two types of personalities most likely to be innovative and bold — the Sensing-Thinking-Judging types (STJ, in Myers-Briggs personality test lingo) and, especially, the Intuitive-Thinking-Judging (NTJ) — think Bill Gates and Jack Welsh. Such people are only 25 percent of the total population but account for 75 percent of the leadership of the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing businesses. And the gazelles attract the creative class, which author Richard Florida contends is about 30 percent of the population.

So what a community can — must — do is make itself receptive to innovation and attractive to the creators. That, says Gibbons, means focusing on three main elements:

1. Information. To thrive today, companies must quickly have all the the facts they need. Littleton subscribes to databases that provide access to 100,000 publications. It tracks market reports by national consulting firms. It conducts seminars in management techniques. It uses GIS software to provide demographic, lifestyle and consumer spending information and keeps track locally of everything from business trends to vacant buildings.

2. Infrastructure. This starts with the basics that government provides, such things as traffic control and sewer lines and sidewalk maintenance. But it also includes "quality of life" projects — parks and open spaces and trails and festivals. And it involves intellectual infrastructure — working with learning institutions to make sure the best practices are taught and the best ideas sought and nurtured. That’s why the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center is one of the most important pieces in the economic-development puzzle being put together in this part of the state.

3. Connections — to trade associations, think tanks, R&D outfits, academic institutions and other similar companies (industry clusters). Research indicates that "an increase in the number of business connections increases the innovation levels of companies."

Economic gardening is very much a work in progress. But the experiment is under way in a number of states and communities. What they are learning — and what we are learning in Fort Wayne and Allen County — is that control of an economy is not really possible. Adaptation through innovation, at the edge of chaos, is.

(You can find a comprehensive account of the development of economic gardening at http://www.littletongov.org