Shepherd Advisors

The Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy at the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy just released the results of their semi-annual Michigan Public Policy Survey.  The complete report is available here. We have summarized a few key takeaways below that stood out to us at Shepherd Advisors:

• A large majority of local officials surveyed see benefits in economic gardening. Results include:
  o 55% of local officials in Michigan agree that, "economic gardening can be an effective economic development tool for their communities," with more than 85% of officials from the largest jurisdictions (30,000+ in population) responding positively.
  o Only 7% of responding economic development officials believe economic gardening cannot be an effective strategy in their community
• A significant majority of municipalities surveyed do not currently provide critical elements of economic gardening's three main elements: information, connectivity, and infrastructure. In fairness, it should be noted that the UM survey includes responses from many more smaller communities than larger ones, and observes that "most of Michigan's smallest jurisdictions perform few economic development activities of any kind," Nonetheless:
  o Less than a quarter of the communities are either "Providing or fostering access to information on markets, customers or competitors" or "Providing or assisting in helping local businesses develop their social networking online,"- services central to economic gardening's "information" pillar.
  o Less than half of surveyed municipalities are "Fostering networking among local business and other organizations" - a service central to the "connectivity" pillar
  o And only 2 of 5 communities are "Developing traditional infrastructure specifically to meet the goal of supporting current local businesses."
• Scale is clearly an important factor to establishing information, connectivity, and infrastructure programs that help local businesses. Of surveyed communities with more than 30,000 in population, roughly 50% provided market information and relevant infrastructure services, and more than 70% provided local business networking. In contrast, of communities with populations of 1,500 or less, slightly more than 10% provided market research services, slightly more than 40% provided relevant infrastructure services, and less than 30% provided connectivity services.
• As active practitioners working with communities to design and implement economic gardening programs, we are somewhat concerned about the survey's overly broad (in our opinion) definition of economic gardening as an "economic development strategy focused on helping existing businesses in a local community in order to encourage job growth." While this is generally accurate, the report considers any one component of a long list of business services (including buy local campaigns, IT infrastructure, etc) to be economic gardening. We at Shepherd Advisors prefer the narrower definition of economic gardening developed by Chris Gibbons, one of the founders of the economic gardening movement. Mr. Gibbons' economic gardening is focused on an integrated approach to growing businesses using a combination of three main elements: information, connectivity, and infrastructure. Mr. Gibbons' economic gardening is also strictly focused on second stage companies, which this report makes no mention of. To learn more about economic gardening according to Chris Gibbons, please read his recent International Economic Development Journal article, "Economic Gardening" available here.

Shepherd Advisors works with communities, policy-makers, and companies to develop and implement economic gardening programs help local high-growth companies succeed.  Please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments about economic gardening.