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Last weekend, I spent three days with 25 economic development professionals from around the country at the Edward Lowe Foundation in Michigan.

We assembled as the first class of students learning about the disciplines of Economic Gardening. For those of you who are not familiar with Economic Gardening, it is a strategy and set of tools developed in the Littleton, Colorado by Chris Gibbons and his team working for the City of Littleton.

With the support of the Lowe Foundation, Chris has been developing a curriculum to teach Economic Gardening to local economic developers.

This approach focuses on strengthening innovation and entrepreneurship within a local economy by focusing carefully on the needs and strategic options of entrepreneurs and growth-oriented companies. The underlying concepts are critically important because they move our thinking from industrial, hierarchical models to network-based, biological models of the economy.

You can learn more about Economic Gardening from the City of Littleton website and from a recent chapter in an SBA report to the President that is available here.  The Lowe Foundation has also been supporting my work in developing new network-based models of economic and workforce development.

A venture capitalist in San Antonio seems to be focusing on the right target: home grown businesses.

When Maytag shut its doors recently in Newton, IA, the civic leadership was understandably shaken. But the answer to Newton's challenge is not to try to recruit another company like Maytag, but it is to grow another company like Maytag.

The same is true for San Antonio, where AT&T recently announced it was moving its headquarters.

As the San Antonio VC puts it:

"We have to make sure we continue to cultivate homegrown companies because they are more sticky. If they move here that means that they left somewhere else. Companies that grow here have deeper roots."

Read more.

Prosperity demands rapid adaptation or, if you prefer, resilience.

Building a stronger regional economy comes from seeing with new eyes. How can our existing assets connect to new opportunities?

Here's an article out of Akron about the adaptation of manufacturing firms to new opportunities in health care markets. The trend revealed itself recently in a forum in Northeast Ohio. Read more.

As Doug Hall, former P&G exec and founder of Eureka Ranch notes, innovation opportunities can emerge anywhere. The process, however, requires discipline, and Doug has been introducing this discipline to smaller manufacturers nationwide though the Manufacturing Extension Partnership.

Here's an example of an opportunity: Replacing vinyl shower curtains with less toxic materials. Folks in Massachusetts are looking at that one: "New shower curtain smell’ dangerous to health, environment".

The opportunities will multiply as our universities and businesses learn to collaborate. Read this opinion piece out of Seattle: Educating a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs