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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When you hear the term “food court”, most of us automatically think, “fast food in a mall”. What if the experience was more about slow food efficiently prepared, with a multitude of sit-down dining choices in environments designed for you to enjoy your food, sprinkled with specialty food shopping choices? Enter the “food hall“.

Pioneering in New York City, a food hall can be described as a high-end food court meets a bustling European open market, specialty supermarket, and a New Age learning

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There aren’t too many times you’re going to hear crowdsourced placemaking discussed at the same time with growing local independent businesses, but the time is now. Check out the following description of “Crowdsourcing, “Carrotmobs” and Local Business” from the Washington DC based Kojo Nnamdi Show:

“Mom and Pop” businesses can’t necessarily beat prices at big box stores or national chains. So some local independent businesses are experimenting with new ways to engage customers and build

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While a restaurant concept initiated in 2007, now known as Elements, is still being crowdsourced into a community-oriented, vegetarian, locally-based third place, a team of creatives in Lansing, Michigan have taken it upon themselves to crowdsource a restaurant in 90 days. Now that’s a timeline fellow creatives can get enthused about.

The video below provides a window into the crowdsourcing process. Ideas to whet the crowd’s appetite are thrown out, as the image above shows, with one idea

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Since local independent retailers don’t have the financial capacity of their national/international chain competitors, they need to look at alternative means of establishing and growing their customer base, especially in an increasingly web-centric knowledge economy.

The Fast Company article, Four Keys to Surviving the Future of Retail largely focuses on national chains, but they can be applied to local independents. Here’s how the four keys:
1. Think Like an Editor
2. Learn From the

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What happens when a virtual world becomes real? What happens when a digital community becomes a physical one? In yet another sign of things to come, that’s what happened to the online realm of Instructables, “a web-based documentation platform where passionate people share what they do and how they do it, and learn from and collaborate with others,“... it became the Instructables Restaurant. Or in this site’s terms, the Instructables crowd is the beta community for crowdsourcing their own

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That essentially captures what New York’s Brooklyn Bowl is all about.

Bowling. Robert Putnam’s best-seller lamented that the social capital in the U.S. was one the decline as we were ‘bowling alone’ more often. While his measure of social capital may be misleading, maybe Brooklyn Bowl’s founders took his comments to heart, as it’d be difficult to bowl alone with a live music venue, restaurant, lounge and ongoing events present. Convergence is what creatives are used to, though not the $40-$50

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Providing retail for the emerging, growing, progressive creatives market doesn’t follow the same rules as provided by retail consultant Robert Gibbs in A primer on retail types and town centers. It’s a good guide for the general population, so let’s see what happens when we converge and remix it with the 19 urban development types for creatives.

First of all, for creatives, it’s no longer just retail, but retail entertainment. Second, retail no longer follows a simple ownership, product

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First of all, most local bookstores simply can’t compete with the likes of Barnes & Noble and Amazon, despite their advantages supporting the local economy. However, it does have a chance if it’s more than a bookstore, adding a few revenue-generating elements. Why the focus on a bookstore? Because if there’s one business that seems doomed in today’s world, this is it, so figuring out a way to not only survive, but thrive, says a lot for many other local independent businesses.  Here are some

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It’s well known that local retail far outweighs the national chains in benefitting the surrounding neighborhood (see previous entry), but how can local indie retailers compete, especially with national chains now going local?

For one, they can crowdsource their customer base with their unique community brand. Second, they can become a VIBE (variegated independent business entrepreneur) and open a diversified portfolio of different, unique businesses in the same neighborhood. Brooklyn is a

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