Economic Gardening

We've worked hard at 1SI to build a business growth stragegies organization that can connect our members to the services and prospective customers they need to reach to increase their profits. This work, what we call business retention and expansion, goes by another more hip and "green" name: economic gardening. It is defined as"...an economic strategy that focuses on supporting local entrepeneurs and small businesses. It is economic development from the inside out, versus from the outside in."
Economic gardening programs focus on three areas to help build small business:
1. Information resources and marketing assistance (also known as 'competitive intelligence').
2. Infrastructure development, including traditional items like roads and taxes as well as quality of life and education
3. Networking and information sharing.

As Shakespeare might say, 'a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet'- and the above paragraph is an exact definition of One Southern Indiana- particularly when you realize that our small buisinesses are often small, privately held advanced manufacturing operations, customer support centers, logistics operations, healthcare providers and construction trades. These are primary industries that bring new dollars into our community. We use our local competitive intelligence knowledge to connect them to cost saving and profit enhancing tools. We also use our advocacy efforts to address those infrastructure needs and use every means availalbe to network and information share.

One Southern Indiana IS economic gardening!