“Can someone state, in one short paragraph, the definition of Economic Gardening? Does it address the existing, current businesses or just focus on new ones? Does it direct the targeting of the recruitment process typically assigned to economic development processes?”

“Economic Gardening is growing local economies by nurturing entrepreneurial businesses. These can be both start-ups and existing businesses who want to grow. It does not recruit.”

“Economic gardening: A business development method that grows small businesses by providing critical information; developing and creating local community infrastructure to embrace growth and change, easing access to intellectual resources and pools of capable employees; and facilitates small business connection, on an affordable basis, to organizations and services useful to achieving growth.”

"Economic gardening is a client- or customer-based professional discipline or practice using a set of tools or techniques that provide an information-rich, decision-oriented environment for small, niche businesses to thrive and grow, with particular interest and focus on meeting the needs of independent, local businesses and entrepreneurs. It often uses economic, demographic, geographic and market-based information and information products to support the business and marketing plans of small businesses and entrepreneurs. And it identifies niches of information service provision, not locally and affordably available, to meet the needs of small independent businesses, and where there's an unserved need, attempts to meet the need through nonprofit or civic programming. It requires purposeful networking and ideally a team of multi-disciplinary professionals, or access to same -- or a really great renaissance professional mulit-tasker!"

“How would you compare your work with Sirolli's work described in "Ripples From The Zambezi"?