Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/109821
obs, jobs, jobs! From the local newspaper to the presidential election, finding new ways to create jobs is the topic du jour. GISs are proving to be a valuable tool in supporting the companies that are most likely to create jobs, through efforts such as ���economic gardening.��� adjusting media targets, reworking sales territories or selecting a new location. Second-stage companies can use the data today with immediate benefits such as stronger response rates, better-informed sales teams with shorter drives to reach more clients and the tools to select the best locations. What���s Economic Gardening? Challenges for GIS Chris Gibbons created the concept of economic gardening nearly 25 years ago in Littleton, Colo. The Denver suburb lost nearly 7,000 jobs when a large, out-of-state employer decided to close a local facility. Faced with such a large employment deficit, the city developed a program to support local companies with the hope that jobs could be grown from within. Research shows that the largest numbers of jobs tend to come from what���s known as ���second-stage companies.��� These companies have seven to 100 employees, revenue ranges from $1 million to $50 million, and growth characteristics that move them out of the startup phase. The program���s aim was to provide these companies with expert-level assistance in marketing, corporate research and company strategy to support further growth as well as retain employment in the local market. There are four major components to an economicgardening strategic research team: 1. Core Strategy 2. Market Research 3. Internet/Search-Engine Optimization/New Media 4. GIS Core strategy looks at the overall health and direction of an organization, while the other three disciplines utilize specific tools to help companies understand the environment in which they���re doing business. GIS is the most recent addition to the economic-gardening approach, as described by Chris Gibbons, founder, National Center for Economic Gardening. ���We added GIS to our toolkit more than a decade ago because of its tremendous ability to present visual meaning in data,��� says Gibbons. ���We were always committed to using the most sophisticated corporate tools we could find and afford, and GIS was a natural expansion of our toolkit.��� In an economic-gardening setting, GIS can offer companies a visual understanding of where their customers live, where competitors lie and where new opportunities are waiting. It gives focus to immediate actions such as ���What���s a ���Ghiss���?��� is one of the most-frequent questions asked when working with a new company. Most companies, outside of engineering and a sparse few other professions, haven���t had the opportunity to work with GIS technology, and it���s often a bit of a stretch to help a new company understand the power of GIS in a few short minutes. However, their eyes open rather quickly when given the opportunity to see where customers are located in comparison to large pools of customers in other untapped markets on a map. The second challenge in economic gardening GIS is that the current business-focused geospatial tools are much more aligned to defining the Business-toConsumer (B2C) market in the United States, through mapping of demographic and consumer-spending information. Although such data are incredibly valuable to many companies, most second-stage growth companies exist in the Business-to-Business (B2B) space, building a supporting part to a larger machine or providing IT or educational services to other organizations. ���There are nearly 50 different city, regional or state economicgardening initiatives running across the United States. F E B R U A R Y 2 O 1 3 / W W W . G E O P L A C E . C O M 27