Page 41 - 1-Entrepreneurship and Local Economic Development by Norman Walzer (z-lib.org)

30 Brian Dabson

Only by communities working together in a regional collaborative context
can this be realized.
Another mountain region, Appalachia, provides a second example of re-
gional framing for entrepreneurship. The Central Appalachian Network
(2005), an alliance of nonprofit, community-based organizations and aca-
demic institutions straddling four states, has developed a series of strategies
for what it calls sustainable entrepreneurship. Emerging clusters of entrepre-
neurial activity need regionally based expertise and infrastructure to en-
courage and support value-added production and services and to connect
individual businesses to regional markets. Many of these needs cannot be
met locally except through regional collaborations across public and private
sectors and through the efforts of regional catalysts and networks.

Principle 2. Systems
The second principle is that any strategy must be systems-based. In most
parts of rural America, there is no shortage of programs and agencies to sup-
port small business development. These initiatives provide advice, training,
technical assistance, and capital access but often are disconnected, categor-
ical, competing, underresourced, and altogether too confusing for entrepre-
neurs to bother to navigate. The most comprehensive critique of these pro-
grams has been provided by Lichtenstein and Lyons (2001) who note that
programs are generally funder-driven rather than client-driven, and focus
on the business activity or on offering specific products rather than on the
needs and circumstances of entrepreneurs (see chapter 6).
Lichtenstein and Lyons (2001) were pioneers in advocating a systems ap-
proach to entrepreneurship development based on tailoring services that
are both responsive to the various levels of skill, education, and motivation
to be found among entrepreneurs and aligned with the capacities and re-
sources of the service providers. A national competition sponsored by the
Kellogg Foundation in 2004, designed by CFED (Dabson 2005a), built on
this thinking and invested in a variety of approaches that would create or
enhance systems approaches to entrepreneurship development.
The desired programs were defined as a coordinated infrastructure of
public and private supports that facilitate entrepreneurship with an effective
system that integrates a wide range of programs and tailors products and
services to the diverse needs of entrepreneurs. These systems, it was deter-
mined, would be comprehensive, flexible, culturally sensitive, and inte-
grated, and should require providers to collaborate rather than operate in-
dependently or in isolation.
The resulting Kellogg-funded project, Entrepreneurship Development Sys-
tems in Rural Development (Dabson 2005a), looked for collaborative ef-
forts that would embrace entrepreneurship education, training and tech-