The face of business in Michigan is changing. Michigan’s challenges in recent years have sparked firms across our state to take their old tools down new paths. Michigan businesses and organizations are meeting the challenge by innovating, dreaming big, taking risks, and blazing new trails to business success.

Midland Tomorrow is one of those organizations. Our new strategic plan retains the best of our existing economic toolkit and takes it to the next level with completely new, bold strategies to drive economic growth. In this plan, we recognize the value of our existing economic base firms, continuing to support them through personal contact and connections to economic incentives and business assistance. But while we keep our internal focus consistent and strong, we’re also looking outward – not just opportunities in our region or state, but across the globe.

We’re looking to take Midland to the world.

Our new, tripartite strategic plan seeks to invigorate our existing knowledge and talent base through access to new innovations and intellectual property, strategic business counseling, and connections to other manufacturers and innovators to develop new relationships and opportunities. We’re going to help cement the connections that make us world class. At the same time, we’re going to research and “smartly target” businesses across the U.S. that fit our existing technology infrastructure, working to build personal relationships with them and show them why locating in the Midland area will be the best choice they’ve ever made. We are aggressively pursuing new jobs and investment from across America. We want them here to benefit our residents and grow our economy.


Strategic Initiative 1: National Chemical Business Attraction
Proactive economic development isn’t about waiting for jobs and investment to come to us. We’re going to research and target specific companies that complement our existing business infrastructure. We’re going to have their business leaders meet with ours and explain to them what’s great about Midland. And, to complement this initiative, we’re going to write extensively about Midland in a global industry periodical to keep our message where it needs to be: in front of decision makers.

This proactive marketing includes a research campaign to identify and contact specific companies within targeted industry sectors that complement Midland’s existing technology infrastructure. Midland Tomorrow staff, in conjunction with high-level leadership from within the Midland cluster technology companies, will then make personal contact with leaders at these companies. Because we have business strengths in our community on an unprecedented scale for a county our size, we often find ourselves competing against much larger regions for investment – regions with more financial resources to bring to the table. We might not be able to compete with dollars, but we can deliver a targeted message to specific companies through personal contact, going beyond dollars and proving to businesses that we’re willing to go the extra mile to build a strategic relationship.


Strategic Initiative 2: Develop Midland’s Culture of Innovation
We plan to make Midland an adaptive leader in fostering and successfully launching high-expectation new technology companies. To do this, we must focus on helping to develop new markets, new customers and new products for our existing businesses and our area.

New market development will involve proactively seeking new market opportunities for our second-stage companies (companies that have passed the survival stage and are considering areas of growth). Our new strategy will work with these growing companies to ensure they’re taking advantage of chances to grow their businesses. New customer development efforts will search inside and outside of Midland for opportunities for our client companies to collaborate in customer/supplier relationships. And new product development initiative, meanwhile, will search for unused intellectual property at major employers or universities for Midland-based companies to commercialize, helping grow their businesses while bringing new ideas into the marketplace.


Strategic Initiative 3: Maintain Midland’s Attractiveness for Our Economic Base
Our larger economic base companies – The Dow Chemical Company, Dow Corning Corporation, MidMichigan Health, McKay Press, and many others – continue to lead the state in its efforts towards economic recovery, and have acted as Midland’s single most powerful defense against Michigan’s economic challenges. Our new proactive strategy will utilize all resources available to us to ensure that when our existing economic base businesses think “expansion” and “investment,” they think “Midland.”

We will accomplish this by identifying expansion opportunities and helping to secure them for Midland companies; fostering specific in-depth partnerships with local companies to ensure the workforce needs of industry are met; minimizing Midland’s and the region’s cost of doing business through economic development incentives; identifying proactive approaches to attracting new investment at the state level, and reducing Midland’s overall cost of doing business by educating companies and people on the expansion process.


Other Initiatives
In addition to the above economic development plan, Midland Tomorrow’s new strategic plan continues to place high priority on marketing our services to our stakeholders as well as improving Midland’s quality of life through participation in focused initiatives (the City’s Project for Public Spaces, Wireless Midland, and the resolution of Midland’s wetlands and dioxin situations, among others) to help attract and retain businesses.

To assist in the implementation of all the new strategic plan initiatives, Midland Tomorrow plans to add additional part-time staff to scout intellectual property across Michigan and to offer consulting assistance on important aspects of our attraction campaign.


Conclusion
Midland has gained innumerable benefits from the chemical and technology industries, which have sheltered us from economic storms and provided a solid foundation for our local economy. In our fiercely competitive economic development climate, it’s time to leverage the full power of our chemical industry background and proactively tell the world why Midland is the location for technology business siting and growth. It’s time for business leaders nationally to hear the summation of a century of cutting-edge research and development, business cooperation and synergy, and a focus on outstanding business together with outstanding quality of life:

Michigan’s technology renaissance begins here.

And in 2007, Midland Tomorrow’s job is to take that story to the world.

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