We’re reaching the tipping point where our investment and tax dollars are going to start benefitting our local economies rather than private investors, with the ‘Long Tail‘ leading the way. Crowdfunding, a natural extension of crowdsourcing, emerges from the Long Tail and is coming to small businesses. It’s about time!

Cities are wising up in prioritize investing in independent businesses districts over chains. According to a BusinessWeek article, subsidies for chains are not effective. Big

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What’s happening in Bristol, Connecticut (pop. 61,000), home of ESPN, is pretty representative of small cities and towns across the country, with a vacant downtown surrounded by auto-oriented sprawl of national chains, isolated office buildings and subdivisions. What’s about to happen in Bristol however, may be a redefining of the American Dream, and a model for these same cities to follow.

Currently, Bristol’s economic retail analysis shows that the largest ‘retail leak’ by far, that is, net

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You hear it all the time - small businesses are the engine of the economy. However, when it comes to economic development programs in each city, the focus is on uprooting other cities’ large companies. Since small businesses are essentially local businesses, maybe we’re just missing some local economic development principles.

How about cutting right to the chase and establishing something like this:

Local Economic Development Principles

As it relates to the community:
- Invest in natural

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What does well-being have to do with the economy have to do with the creative industries? For the purposes of this entry, let’s use Gallup’s well-being that measures life evaluation, emotional health, physical health, healthy behavior, work environment and basic access (definitions of each here); GDP for the economy; and the creative class for the creative industries.

Thanks to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, cities are now measured for happiness, with the San Jose, Washington DC,

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We all know the economy needs jobs. Not industrial economy jobs, which we’re transitioning away from, but knowledge economy jobs. But where did the Apples, Microsofts and HPs that fuel today’s economy come from? That’s right, startups.

Our entry Gazelles + Economic Gardening = Prosperity highlighted this very trend back in 2003. In 2007, we posted how every neighborhood needs a coworking space. Today we’re in a jobs crisis. The time is right to converge these two trends.

First, Blake

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From a creative economy point of view, are towns, cities and even regions not within a ‘mega-region’ (10 to 50 million people) not worth investing significantly in?

From the Prospect article, Ruse of the Creative Class, responding to the premise behind economist Richard Florida’s upcoming book, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity,

In a warm-up to his next book, Florida has been arguing that the recession has so decimated many cities and regions

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The motivating factor behind writing entries for this blog is that I get to work directly with progressive creatives and developers to crowdsource these concepts into built reality.

So, considering the state of the economy, what are creatives’ solution in how the development of a building can become a symbol for economic growth? The following framework of a building will soon be crowdsourced in Washington DC as an answer:

- Local, independent businesses on the ground floor. Not only do local

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How much of a greater impact do local retailers have on nationals? The Urban Conservancy recently completed a study with Civic Economics to answer just that, called Thinking Outside the Box: A Report on Independent Merchants and the New Orleans Economy. Keep in mind this is just economics, and not considering the cultural impact on the local neighborhood.

According to the study, when compared to leading chain competitors on a per square foot basis, local retailers:
- generate twice the annual

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New Orleans is attracting scores of entrepreneurs and small businesses, and there hasn’t been a better time to be a creative. “There has never been a better time in Louisiana for the creative class to thrive,” says state lieutenant governor, Mitchell J. Landrieu. Why such a bold statement?

First of all, the evidence.
- New Orleans’ metro area gained 100,000 nonfarm, post-Katrina jobs from October 2005 to June 2009, and by 2016 is expected to grow 24% from 2006 levels to 98.8% of

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For the purpose of understanding the evolution of our economy and our quality of life, if there was ever one definitive graphic, this is it. However, to understand the current creative, knowledge-based, whole new mind economy from an individual’s point of view, you have to get to know the work at ThinkStudio, a global think tank based in Switzerland.

The chart above illustrates the direct economy, where “customer knowledge is replacing producer knowledge”. ThinkStudio illustrates this

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