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The University of Northern Iowa's Advance Iowa program, the state's only certified Economic Gardening center, has officially started. Advance Iowa is an economic development program that focuses on the expansion of small and medium-sized businesses using the Economic Gardening approach.
Economic Gardening is often referred to as a "grow your own" strategy for economic development and is a proven economic growth strategy that focuses on providing information and tools to grow existing businesses. To use this approach to meet the unique needs of Iowa, the Advance Iowa team consists of skilled researchers who mine sophisticated databases and use high-end tools r... Read More
via Professional Developers of Iowa
The Advance Iowa program, a new initiative from the University of Northern Iowa was highlighted and showcased at the 2013 National Economic Gardening Conference on June 6, in Kansas City.
Advance Iowa is an innovative economic development program focusing on helping small/medium sized businesses grow and expand using custom tailored solutions that have been proven successful nationally. The program follows the Economic Gardening approach created by the Edward Lowe Foundation, who also puts on this annual event.
Dan Beenken, Program Manager of Advance Iowa says, “It really was a great opportunity to be a part of a national even... Read More
via Economix Blog, New York Times
As a growing number of small business organizations pursue a policy agenda distinct from that of corporate America, they may be able to nudge state and local government toward new economic development strategies.
Currently, the businesses best able to garner generous grants and tax incentives by promising to create jobs within specific political boundaries are large, mobile corporations that can pit communities against one another, demanding ever-higher subsidies.
Greg LeRoy wrote about the problem at length in “The Great American Jobs Scam.” In his 2010 book, “In... Read More
via Professional Developers of Iowa
UNI is leading a new initiative beginning in the fall of 2012 to serve existing mid-sized Iowa businesses with customized technical assistance through an approach called Economic Gardening. The new program will be called Advance Iowa.
Economic Gardening Economic Gardening (EG) is a highly customized set of technical assistance services delivered in part, by a specialty research team, offering in-depth secondary market research, business intelligence, social media marketing assistance and growth strategy options to employer firms with 9-99 employees. First developed in Littleton, Colorado, Economic Gardening was adopted and scaled by the... Read More