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Gardening or Hunting in Pursuit of an Enterprise Culture?

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Gardening and Hunting are two very different approaches to developing an enterprise culture.

A gardening approach sets out to create jobs and entrepreneurial activity by investing in local people and their talents, cultures, passions and skills.  It as an endogenous “arising from within” approach to community and economic development.  The starting point for economic gardening says that ‘in this community we have all that we need to build a vibrant and sustainable future’.  It may need careful nurturing to help it thrive but the seeds of our future success are already sown.

The key tools of economic gardening include:

  • building open and accessible networks for potential and current entrepreneurs that foster the exchange of ideas and collaboration
  • signposting to existing and continually improving support  services that help local people on their enterprise journey
  • locally available, convivial and very low (preferably no) cost coaching support to help local people to nurture their dreams and aspirations and to believe in their ability to develop them
  • access to commercial finance for local people with investment ready business ideas
  • support services that recognise that everyone has the potential to become more enterprising and don’t just work with those that are already entrepreneurial.

This contrasts with economic hunting which sets to create jobs and entrepreneurial activity by attracting investment and employment into a community from outside.  The starting point here is one that says ‘our community is deficient.  We lack the entrepreneurs to create employment so we have to attract them from elsewhere.  Then perhaps some of the entrepreneurial pixie dust will rub of onto local people.  And if it doesn’t, well at least we will have attracted entrepreneurs who will provide them with jobs.’  This is an exogeneous approach to community and economic development.

The key tools of economic hunting include:

  • the creation of facilities and resources to attract companies or ‘creative class’ members to set up their homes and businesses in our community (NB usually these resources are beyond the means of many local people to access).  If you are in a facility that serves a ‘much better cup of coffee at a higher price’ than anywhere else in the neighbourhood, or if many local people are priced out of your facility, then there is a strong chance that it is the product of economic hunting rather than gardening.
  • the development of inward investment teams and budgets to enable local authorities and regional development agencies to negotiate ‘sweetened’ deals for employers to locate in their communities
  • support services that focus almost exclusively on the ‘already entrepreneurial’ as those who have the potential to create wealth and employment for the rest of us.

Historically most of the investment has gone into economic hunting strategies.

There has been a rise in interest (if not yet investment) in economic gardening.  I see no fundamental reason why the two can’t co-exist in the same community, but they are not always comfortable bed fellows.  Economic hunting usually means changing things to make them convivial to outsiders (better coffee, better carpets and sexy furniture).  Economic gardening means making things really convivial to local people; affordable, local and accessible.

Often community based enterprise development programmes struggle to help local people to access the business support infrastructure that was designed as an economic hunting tool.  It is not designed to be convivial to local people, but to that special breed of entrepreneur from out of town who will pay £3.40 for a posh coffee and £20 an hour to hire a meeting room.  More often than not such facilities fail to win in either of these two market places.

So which tribe do you belong to?  The hunters or the gardeners?

What would happen if we took some of the budget for ‘inward investment’ and put it into the hands of ‘community development’?

Why An Alternative LEP?

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It is early days for Local Enterprise Partnerships.  And I wish them well.

But the early signs are that they are made up, more or less, of the usual suspects, working in the usual ways, making the usual assumptions – and may produce the usual results.

So following conversation with a few people who seemed to share these concerns and expressed an interest, here is The Alternative LEP.  A place where the usual and not so usual suspects can share ideas, work in unusual ways, explore the potential of starting from fresh assumptions and discuss the kind of economic and regeneration activities that might be developed as a result.

What if LEPs:

  • worked to ensure that the economy existed to serve people (all of us) instead of us existing to serve it?
  • refused to look at the economy in isolation but as one part of a much wider system including people and the environment?
  • really embraced the debate around the challenges of continued economic growth and its impact on the environment – instead of presenting economic growth as entirely a good thing?
  • explored and developed enterprise as a quality of communities, localities and people instead of focussing on old school economic measures such as GDP?
  • focused on investment in local people and communities rather than attracting investors from elsewhere – a preference for economic gardening over economic hunting
  • recognised the historical failure of such organisations to successfully plan the economy and provide the infrastructure required – and instead of trying to ‘take charge of the local economy’, ‘facilitated local enterprise’?
  • understood that we can’t ‘develop’ economies  or communities.  But we can help people to develop  – and people are great at building both community and the economy – given the chance

If we started from these assumptions perhaps we would commission some very different activity…

Why ‘enterprise’ trumps ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘economic’

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I think that enterprise is much more important for our communities than either entrepreneurship or economic development.

Entrepreneurship focuses on encouraging people to move into self-employment or to start, or grow their own business.

Enterprise is about people thinking about their current situation and how it might be improved and developing strategies that will move them towards their preferred future.

By promoting enterprise in this way we will of course encourage entrepreneurship. As people become more enterprising they may, on occasion, need to start a new business to get them from where they are to their preferred future.

However our default setting should be to dissuade people from starting a business. If we can easily put them off, then it is likely that they would not have the necessary perseverance to make the business work. If they are insistent that only by starting a business can they become the kind of person that they wish to be and create the kind of future that they wish to have, then, and only then, should we roll our sleeves up and do all we can to help them succeed in their entrepreneurial venture, safe in the knowledge that they have the determination and persistence that they will require to succeed.

By adopting a premise that we should persuade as many people as possible not to start a business I believe that we can significantly increase the survival rate of those businesses that do start-up. As people in the community begin to see businesses that are both well thought through and successful taking hold, more and more will begin to believe that starting a business is not, almost inevitably, going to end in more debt and misery.  Slowly but surely start up rates too will start to climb.

However, even in the most entrepreneurial communities it is likely that fewer than 10 in 100 people of working age are ever likely to start their own business.  I would contend that of those hundred people every one of them could benefit from learning how to become more enterprising. That is, how to identify their current situation, how to recognise what an improvement might look like, and to put in place plans and actions to move in that direction.

This is why I think that enterprise is much more important, as a concept or a philosophy, for our communities than entrepreneurship or ‘economic development’. If we wish to have more entrepreneurial communities then we must start by first making them more enterprising.

In The Alternative LEP we will endeavour to remember that the E stands for Enterprise, not Entrepreneurial or Economic.