Page 63 - 1-Entrepreneurship and Local Economic Development by Norman Walzer (z-lib.org)

52 Ron Hustedde

Hawarden, Iowa, was ignored by its cable company in Denver when it wanted
to expand the local telecommunications network in 1994. The community
didn’t take “no” for an answer.
Instead, they discovered their own assets by passing a $4.5 million rev-
enue bond and building a hybrid fiber/coaxial framework. It kept one of
the current employers in town and led to other economic opportunities
(Schultz 2004).

STRATEGY 6. BUILD A SHARED
VISION ABOUT ENTREPRENEURSHIP

A community-based vision is the big picture about where the community or
region is headed. A community vision about entrepreneurship cannot stand
alone; it must be fully integrated with other aspects of a broader vision
about community directions. Ideally, the process involves the key strategies
mentioned earlier such as creating opportunities to learn, question, and
think differently about entrepreneurship and focusing on community and
regional assets.
In many cases, the visioning effort is a work in progress. For example,
Owen County, Kentucky, has involved more than one-fourth of its residents
in developing a community-based vision (RUPRI 2006). The entrepreneur-
ship component is still being integrated into the broader community vi-
sion. Teams visit the county’s innovative entrepreneurs and learn more
about youth entrepreneurship as their dream matures.
In the case of Littleton, Colorado, several thousand people lost their jobs
from the closure of a manufacturing firm. Rather than focus on recruiting
jobs through industrial recruitment, a community vision emerged to grow
entrepreneurs from the inside—a concept called economic gardening (RUPRI
2006).
The Littleton vision for entrepreneurship focuses on high-growth firms.
Littleton provides free information such as marketing trends and Geo-
graphic Information Systems (GIS) software to map clients’ addresses. They
invest in an intellectual infrastructure such as great schools, training pro-
grams, and linking higher education with aspiring entrepreneurs to sharpen
the skills of entrepreneurs and to keep their businesses competitive.
Littleton is also creating opportunities for trade organizations to emerge
and for think tanks, including entrepreneurs and universities, to network
and pursue other forms of innovation. The payoff has been that from 1998
to the present, jobs in the city have increased from 14,000 to 29,000
(RUPRI 2006). During that time, the city has not offered incentives or tax
breaks to recruit businesses. The concepts behind economic gardening can
be applied toward a rural vision for entrepreneurship: grow your own tar-