Discussion Answer method is in the attachments Leigh & Blakely: Chapter 5 McDonald: Chapter 2 In reviewing this module's question, incorporate your understanding of economic development. Also cons

Local Planning Process for Economic Development

There are really two ways of looking at economic development in today's world. There's a traditional economic development approach and then there's what we style is the technology or innovation lay led approach to economic development. The traditional economic development really looks at the retention and expansion of existing businesses. It emphasizes the recruitment of new business investment from outside the economy, outside the regional economy. And this is a lot of very heavy marketing to recruit specific industries to locate in a region. Because of a competitive advantage based on infrastructure, based on ready to go building sites, adaptive reuse of existing buildings, utilities, access to markets and raw materials. Just the general gist of what makes a business competitive. A lot of times this is in the manufacturing space. Also, traditional approach of economic development is tied very heavily to incentives. These incentives takes the form of helping with infrastructure improvements, water, wastewater improvements to serve a plant site. Also tax incentives to reduce the liability of these businesses when they start up and as they generate jobs in business investment, those incentives then tail off. The practice that our partnership, our regional group does here in Lynchburg, Virginia, is called technology-based or innovation led economic development. This is about creating a little intellectual capacity through innovation, creating ideas and taking those ideas to marketplace, to solve a marketplace problem, to give competitive advantage to a lot of leading edge businesses. The real key to this is mechanism for transferring that knowledge and that knowledge from a R and D research and development environment all the way to commercialization where there's actually customers and products to be sold. Our economic development is focused on trying to create that continuum. One of the key components to this type of approach, this technology-based economic development approach, is it's high in mid skilled workforce. We do this through a heavy concentration of workforce development, getting the talent in place to be as competitive advantage to attract that type of business investment. We also looking at to create and sustain an entrepreneurship and small business development ecosystem, essentially creating jobs by the 1s and the 2s rather than in the traditional approach is looking for the 1000 person firm, ten hundred, fifteen hundred person plant. We also are investing quite heavily in telecommunications, broadband availability for every part of our region, both rural, suburban and urban telecommunications we feel is the key to the future. Having a robust system where everybody is connected to the worldwide web. And then also another vital ingredients of sources and access to risk capital. Getting the financing in place to make these ventures successful.