Economic Skunk Works and Beta Programs

There is a lot of risk inherent in Economic Development, both for the region being developed and for the people trying to improve the economy. When jobs are at stake and bureaucracy weighs down an idea it can be very difficult to try something new, to test the untested. This however is exactly what needs to be done in order to make economic development efforts successful. The world is changing too quickly for all the same techniques to work as well, and they or may not work at all. Further with unemployment as high as it is there is clearly room for improvement in economic development efforts, room to find better programs for improving the economy.

In order to find new effective ways to develop the economy those organizations involved in economic development should when possible create "Skunk Works" like teams and Beta Programs.

Skunk Works is the research and innovative branch of Lockheed Martin which is tasked with developing innovations. It is a group of highly knowledgeable, creative and skilled people who are free to develop new ideas and test new concepts. Similar to this concept is the idea of Intrapreneurship - a person or team who develops start up programs within a larger structure. Google has one of these programs in which it allows employees to spend a certain portion of their time working on unique and new ideas of their own. Those programs that get developed often enter a Beta phase in which they receive a limited public release in order to further test them.

In economic development multiple ideas could be tested in small ways in order to gauge the impact a larger more expensive program would have. This way an economic development organization could experiment with many projects to see which ones are the most effective for their needs.