Author: Smart City Memphis

By John Lawrence We need to shape the built environment to enable and facilitate innovative, new-economy growth. Considerable employee-to-firm and firm-to-firm mismatches exist in the Memphis Metro area, while the new knowledge...

by John Lawrence This community needs to invest in innovation programs that are stage-specific and linked to regional industry strengths. Innovation is a crucial component in the new economy.  Innovative entrepreneurial...

By John Lawrence: A legacy of agriculture and distribution has left this region home to a low-skill workforce engaged in mostly repetitive, non-innovative jobs.  The Memphis MSA ranks 83 out of 100 on the Brookings Skills Gap...

By John Lawrence Despite possessing unparalleled infrastructure for international trade, the Memphis Region rarely promotes this infrastructure strategically and provides little export business assistance. An export plan is...

We write often here about economic development, and in this vein, John Lawrence, a longtime friend and someone who understands the factors that make Memphis and Shelby County successful, is authoring nine posts for us in the...

We write often on this blog about economic development, our concern about our troubling economic indicators, and our suggested strategies for improving our trajectory.  John Lawrence, a longtime friend who has worked in the...

We write often here about economic development, our concern about our  languishing economic indicators, and possible strategies for improving our trends lines.  In this vein, John Lawrence, a longtime friend of ours and someone...

We were writing in our last post about how the tax waiver incentive program in Memphis and Shelby County is broken, but even more to the point, despite our largesse in doling out almost $100 million in tax waivers a year, our...

We are like the vast majority of people in Memphis and Shelby County when it comes to the liberal tax freeze policy here. Like most people, we are not suggesting that the PILOT (Payment-in-lieu-of taxes) program should be...