The Backstory of Economic Gardening

…Economic Gardening traces its roots back to 1987 in Littleton, Colorado, when defense contractor Martin Marietta cut its workforce in half in response to the collapse of the Berlin wall and the dissolution of the USSR. The resulting 7,000 lost jobs led the city council to rely less on out-of-state corporations and more on local growth companies…

That 1987 city council gave the simple direction to the economic developers: “work with local companies to create good jobs.”  They weren’t interested in burger flipping jobs.

Shortly thereafter, the Littleton staff met Phil Burgess who was CEO of a Denver think tank called Center for the New West. Phil was convinced that economies could be built by working with local, stage 2 growth companies that sold to external markets.  He told the Littleton economic developers that they should shift away from economic hunting (recruiting) and in instead focus on economic gardening (growing your own.)

Over the next several years the Littleton staff met with a number of leading thinkers in the field, including Paul Romer who went on to win a Nobel Prize in economics.  They also attended conferences about the new science of Complex Adaptive Systems at the Santa Fe Institute which described the inner workings of biological systems including both business and economies. 

Adding sophisticated, corporate level tools to these foundational principles and then working out the root problems that prevented companies from growing, Economic Gardening started producing amazing results.  The job base in Littleton grew from 15,000 to 30,000 without recruiting a single company. 

Within a decade the program started winning national awards and the story of its success spread across the country.  Over 800 communities inquired into the details of how it worked. 

A National Center for Economic Gardening was then established to do several things:

• Create a training program to certify professionals and programs in Economic Gardening
• Establish a national team to help local communities and regions run a pilot program to evaluate it as a permanent program
• Build an infrastructure to support the national rollout of the program

Today the program operates in 25 states and has been cited for its consistent and predictable results in creating jobs and wealth for a community at a very modest cost.