Businesses study how to strengthen status

More jobs, better access to capital and more technology parks could be in Utah's future if the Department of Business and Economic Development is successful with some new strategies.

Those strategies were presented by Martin Frey and Ladd Christensen, co-directors of the department, Thursday at a meeting of the state Board of Business and Economic Development.

The overall department structure is under three main headings: creating new business, growing existing business and recruiting business into the state.

Among the proposals for creating new businesses are:

• Developing "clusters," whereby Utah is "best in class" in targeted industries. But the state needs to establish a consensus of what those clusters are, Frey said.

"One of the challenges we've seen in the past with some of the 'ecosystems' and the Silicon Valley initiative is perhaps we tried to do too many things and we had so many specialties and focus areas, nothing was really core-focused . . . ," he said, referring to programs instituted under former Gov. Mike Leavitt.

The energy and film industries already have been identified. The state wants to increase the film industry impact on the economy by 25 percent in 2005 and 20 percent more in 2006, plus increase the number of production days by 40 percent in 2005 and 30 percent next year.

• Developing a faster, more effective Centers of Excellence program by July 1, to help turn university-generated technology into Utah jobs.

• Boosting capital formation by lowering the cost of capital and increasing the amount of entrepreneurial funding.

• Establishing statewide best practices for economic development, with training and methodology developed by December.

• Creating more technology parks, with a new planning council developing the blueprints by this fall and construction starting in spring 2007.

In the "growing existing business" category, Christensen said the department's goal is to "connect and reach" 75 percent of the companies over the next 12 months. He also said the department should provide some sort of services to 50 percent of those businesses "in a relatively short time."

Regarding business recruitment, Frey said one goal is a seamless outsourcing of the recruiting process. By June 30, the state will pick a partner organization to help select and recruit targeted companies.

As for economic development incentives, Frey said the goal is to accelerate their use in order to double the number of jobs crated in 2005. One component is creating a new incentive package to attract corporate headquarters "and think a little differently than the kinds of things that we've done at a smaller scale, and if we're successful, we're thinking more at the Fortune 500 level," Frey said.

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