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Last weekend, I spent three days with 25 economic development professionals from around the country at the Edward Lowe Foundation in Michigan.
We assembled as the first class of students learning about the disciplines of Economic Gardening. For those of you who are not familiar with Economic Gardening, it is a strategy and set of tools developed in the Littleton, Colorado by Chris Gibbons and his team working for the City of Littleton.
With the support of the Lowe Foundation, Chris has been developing a curriculum to teach Economic Gardening to local economic developers.
This approach focuses on strengthening innovation and entrepreneurship within a local economy by focusing carefully on the needs and strategic options of entrepreneurs and growth-oriented companies. The underlying concepts are critically important because they move our thinking from industrial, hierarchical models to network-based, biological models of the economy.
You can learn more about Economic Gardening from the City of Littleton website and from a recent chapter in an SBA report to the President that is available here. The Lowe Foundation has also been supporting my work in developing new network-based models of economic and workforce development.
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