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Waiting for the Good Jobs to Come
I continue to hear comments in our area, something to the effect of “Now, we can go to work attracting companies with “good” jobs so we can be prosperous again.” We’ve heard this kind of comment fairly regularly in the past. Either “If we could only do this or that…” or “We need to do this or that….” we can attract the companies with the good jobs to come here. In the past, the “this or that” usually involved some kind of financial incentive or tax abatement.
For the most part, gone are the days of big, expensive carrots attracting companies to move into a region, bringing high paying jobs. Today, with the older style economy gone, economic development is no longer going to work the way it did over the last 40 to 50 years. If we continue to wait for good jobs to come from this strategy, we’ll continue to be disappointed.
The key to having the good jobs “return” to our region is to develop and grow our existing businesses and encourage the creation of new businesses from within. We need to grow 50 businesses, to each add 10 jobs instead of thinking we can attract some big company to ride into town on a white horse with 500 new jobs.
This growth can happen by developing new methods of innovation within each company; innovation that creates and brings new products and services to the market in much faster and more prolific ways. Companies can develop these new methods and there are people now going around the country and world demonstrating how to use innovation for growth and jobs.
With design and prototype capabilities of maker spaces like Fab Lab ICC, bringing new products to market, even for small companies is much faster and less expensive that it was even five or six years ago. The cost of developing a prototype a few years ago could easily amount to $15,000 - $20,000 and take one to two years. Last year, in 2015, we helped an entrepreneur prototype 50 sets of patented plastic clips for a total cost of about $1500 and he was finished in 5 – 6 weeks.
The hottest economic areas in the United States are using innovation and maker spaces (like Fab Lab ICC) to promote small business start-ups and growth strategies for existing small businesses. Once they get that going, the larger companies become interested without financial and tax concessions because they want to be where the action is. Northwest Arkansas (Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers, and Bentonville) is one of the hottest economies. The region is growing at the rate of 30 people per day. They are accomplishing this by promoting themselves as a region and emphasizing innovation and small business growth.
With the way the global economy continues to change, a focus on innovation and small business growth is the best hope of providing the good jobs.
Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu. Archive columns and podcasts at www.fablabicc.org.
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