Economic Gardening and Economic Hunting are two very different approaches to developing an enterprise culture.<\/p>\n
An economic gardening approach sets out to create jobs and entrepreneurial activity by investing in local people and their talents, cultures, passions and skills.\u00a0 It is an endogenous “arising from within” approach to community and economic development.\u00a0 The starting point for economic gardening says that ‘in this community we have all that we need to build a vibrant and sustainable future’.\u00a0 It may need careful nurturing to help it thrive but the seeds of our future success are already sown.<\/p>\n
The key tools of economic gardening include:<\/p>\n
This contrasts with economic hunting which sets to create jobs and entrepreneurial activity by attracting investment and employment into a community from outside.\u00a0 The starting point here is one that says ‘our community is deficient.\u00a0 We lack the entrepreneurs to create employment so we have to attract them from elsewhere.\u00a0 Then perhaps some of the entrepreneurial pixie dust will rub of onto local people.\u00a0 And if it doesn’t, well at least we will have attracted entrepreneurs who will provide them with jobs.’\u00a0 This is an exogeneous approach to community and economic development.<\/p>\n
The key tools of economic hunting include:<\/p>\n
Historically most of the investment has gone into economic hunting strategies.<\/p>\n
There has been a rise in interest (if not yet investment) in economic gardening.\u00a0 I see no fundamental reason why the two can’t co-exist in the same community, but they are not always comfortable bed fellows.\u00a0 Economic hunting usually means changing things to make them convivial to outsiders (better coffee, better carpets and sexy furniture).\u00a0 Economic gardening means making things really convivial to local people, affordable, local and accessible.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 It is not designed to be convivial to local people, but to that special breed of entrepreneur from out of town who will pay \u00a33.40 for a posh coffee and \u00a320 an hour to hire a meeting room.\u00a0 More often than not such facilities fail to win in either of these two market places.<\/p>\n
So which tribe do you belong to?\u00a0 The hunters or the gardeners?<\/p>\n