When I talk to communities about the need to view residential neighborhoods as business districts because of the growth in home-based workers and businesses, economic developers often get upset. They get upset because having lots of small businesses driving a local economy does not fit the old Manufacturing Economy model of just trying to attract businesses from other regions.
This article from Fortune (hat tip to Slashdot) illustrates an increasingly common business--one with a majority of its employees working from home. MySQL AB is a major tech firm with 320 employees in 25 countries, and 70 percent of those employees work from home.
What that means is marketing industrial and business parks with great water and sewer offers nothing to a company like this one. Instead of the company relocating, it is employees and business owners that are relocating, and they want two things: great quality of life and affordable broadband. And the affordable broadband has to be in residential neighborhoods, not the local industrial park.
It's not that you give up on your business and industrial parks--far from it. But it does mean that you have to expand your economic development strategy to include new kinds of businesses, new kinds of workers, and new kinds of infrastructure, like fiber to the home. One interesting tidbit from the article is that MySQL relies heavily on Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone services to keep things working smoothing--and that means, once again, that broadband service in worker homes is critical.
How does your community rate in this new global economy? Do you have programs and strategies in place to attract work from businesses and employees? If not, why not? Why ignore the double digit job growth increases from work at home businesses?