George Nemeth · The Ruse of the Econ Dev consultant

January 20th, 2010

See this made me smile. I probably should go back into the BFD archives and find all the posts and comments re: this. Suffice it to say we told you so:

In April 2006, the Richard Florida show arrived in the Southern Tier of Upstate New York. It was only one of the scores of appearances this decade by the economic-development guru, whose speaking fee soared to $35,000 not long after his 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class made him a star on the lecture circuit. Cleveland, Toledo, Baltimore, Greensboro, Green Bay, Des Moines, Hartford, Roanoke, and Rochester were among the many cities that had already shelled out to hear from the good-looking urban-studies professor about how to get young professionals to move in.

Of course, none of these burgs has yet completed the transformation from post-manufacturing ugly duckling to gay-friendly, hipster swan…

Apparently, Florida is reaching for the brass ring, only consulting with cities who can afford his blotted consulting salary: “In a warm-up to his next book — The Great Reset, due out in April — Florida has been arguing that the recession has so decimated many cities and regions that it’s time for the country to cut its losses and instead encourage growth in places that are prospering, like Silicon Valley, Boulder, Austin, and North Carolina’s Research Triangle.”

via Economic Development Marketing: The Ruse of the Creative Class.

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2 Responses to “The Ruse of the Econ Dev consultant”

  1. JS Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 10:38 am

    I’m no fan of Florida. However, *any* Econ Dev’s fee can be evaluated in proportion to the Economic Development they can prove they produce.

    If the connection is hazy, look for those bloated fees to plummet. And soon, I suspect.

    Likewise, if you can’t produce some fairly pragmatic ROI connection, then a two dollar consulting fee is bloated.

    Economic development advice either pays for itself by orders of magnitude making the size of the fee practically meaningless, or the fee is wasted.

    Without a clear, solid connection to results, every fee of whatever size is bloated.

  2. Ed Morrison Says:
    January 20th, 2010 at 4:36 pm

    Well said. Too few economic development consultants — there are some, but not many — focus on the real challenge: implementation…translating ideas into action.

    As for Florida, he seems to fancy himself. The sad part is that his ideas are often borrowed without attribution. So, for example, his work on creative cities borrowed heavily from work underway in Europe. (A far better book on the role of creativity and cities: Charles Landry’s The Creative City.)

    (Another lapse: Florida’s more recent focus on mega-regions makes little mention of the early work on this concept at Virginia Tech or the America 2050 project.)

    I’ve always found Florida’s formulations impractical. Extending his Creative Class ideas with his “indexes” does not help much, it turns out.

    Our colleagues at Indiana University recently worked with us on a set of tools for regional innovation. They found very little correlation between Florida’s creativity indexes and regional innovation performance.

    Florida, it seems, has turned from being an academic to a popularizer.

    (Learn more about our work on regional innovation here.)