Mark Muro

Metro business plans

Policy Director, Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program., Apr 11, 11.

Tagged with cities, economics, business, people

Whether or not the federal government shuts down this weekend, I have an announcement: U.S. metropolitan areas are open for business and striving innovatively to create jobs and transform the economy.

How do I know it? Because we’ll be talking with more than 300 business, government, and community leaders from around the country at a forum Monday morning at Brookings to debut metropolitan business plans—a new concept in action-oriented, bottom-up economic development that we’ve helped to launch and I describe in our framing paper, “Metropolitan Business Plans: A New Approach to Economic Growth.

Metro business planning, as I noted a few months ago, exemplifies the pragmatic, increasingly assertive, and self-sufficient style of U.S. regions, which have grown tired of the unhelpful posturing and rigidities of Washington.

Through this approach, smart consortia of regional leaders have come together to apply the methodology of private-sector business planning to the business of revitalizing regional economic development. In that fashion, smart regions are pursuing a disciplined, rational process to prepare tailored, data-rich, highly specific challenges to federal, state, local, and philanthropic players to “invest” in their “bottom-up” plans for economic growth (with a firm promise of return on investment)...

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Source: The New Republic, April 8, 2011

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