It almost goes without saying that growing the U.S. economy is upfront on most people’s minds these days.  A lot of people want this to happen, but how does one go about growing the economy?  While it seems like a big job that only government can do, in fact, it’s not so hard if we look carefully.  

My motto is “Think like an ecosystem”.  How can this idea relate to the economy?

Growth has two key aspects – sheer volume of growth, and annual percentage growth.  Take a forest, for example. Big trees add a lot of volume each year, but they have a slower annual percentage growth compared to small trees which have a greater annual percentage growth rate, yet each tree individually adds relatively small amounts of volume per year.

In the economy, streamlining big old-line companies can have a big impact on the economy – but there’s a catch to focusing on just the big fish.  In the economy, the biggest companies tend to be the slowest to respond to changing values in society.  If we look at the 1990’s, the highest growth companies, both in percentage and volume, came from tech sector firms that were teaching society whole new ways to get things done.

Today, the green economy represents similarly huge shift in how to meet our needs and desires. The explosive growth of organic foods is just the tip of the iceberg. While greening up old-line companies can have a substantial positive impact, there are thousands of small pioneering companies that are on the cutting edge of the green value-driven economy who play a catalytic role – fostering economic shifts and growth far beyond their own bottom line.  Like the tech companies of the 1990’s, these new-era green companies are changing society’s core values, and providing new goods and services. As entrepreneurship guru Guy Kawasaki says, “Create meaning!”  Today’s green companies have a huge global advantage when it comes to that, and that advantage can translate into growth for the U.S. economy.

Any gardener knows that some basic things are essential for success – good seeds, good soil, sunlight, and water.  Likewise, EcoSector is providing the green economy a new framework for supporting all emerging green companies.  We look at the common needs of green entrepreneurs and seek to meet these needs via a community-driven approach.  Individual members and expert associates of the EcoSector community provide the basic essentials to these companies:  good advice, good strategies, good systems for success, and “water” via membership gifts to the EcoSector Industry Association.

During the 1990’s the tech sector had many soup-to-nuts “launch shops” for tech companies, especially in Silicon Valley that provided similar types of support for tech entrepreneurs. Today, the number of green startups is astounding.  EcoSector is one of the first start-up shops for the green economy, and we bring a new twist to the old model. The green sector is actually too big to be served only by the methods that worked in the 1990’s. By adding a community-based approach, EcoSector aims to foster a broad base of environmental-economic leaders who can launch scores of green companies that in turn will help green up and grow America’s economy city by city, state by state, and region by region.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 10:25 am and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.