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Mobilize Maine

07.25.2009

Maine is embarking on a new way of thinking about economic development:

“It’s a culture shock. It’s a restart and you couldn’t ask to do it at a better time, given the national and state economy…I’ve been in economic development for 35 years and this is the biggest change that I’ve seen Maine looking to do…It’s a major shift in thinking. We don’t think, ‘If we only had another industrial park.’ No, it’s, ‘What are the good things we have?…And how are we really going to be able to leverage those so that our economy grows?”

- Michael Aube, president of Eastern Maine Development Corporation

Yup.

The real test here will be whether or not Maine has the courage to see this through. The “buffalo hunting” approach to economic development lives on because people–and especially politicians–like the feeling of winning, despite a growing body of evidence that many of those deals produce no winners at all. Economic development strategies like asset mapping and economic gardening can also satisfy our desire to win, but the payoff period can be quite a bit longer than what our hard-wired sense of immediate gratification is willing to accept. Moreover, these are data-driven strategies, and we know how most people feel about data, especially in this business.

So we’ll see how this plays out in Maine. Mobilize Maine could be the start of rewiring the culture of economic development in the state, and hopefully other regions around the U.S.