Locked in the Twilight Zone: Business Retention Fails the Strategic Value Test! Eric P. Canada Blane, Canada Ltd. © Blane, Canada Ltd. Published in Economic Development Review, Summer, 1996 "The most significant contribution to economic development in 1996." - Roepke Award Winning Article Business retention programs are not reaching their potential. The model currently in use produces little information to help manage or anticipate economic growth, predict companies at risk, or identify growth industries. Questions of significant strategic value constitute less then 12% of the questions posed in the typical survey or visit. "Business retention programs that fail to gather predictive data are only 40% effective. The truth is, we were wrong! There is even less strategic value to the information collected under the business retention model currently in use. After analyzing more than 50 retention survey instruments, the results indicate that: • More than 53% of the questions confirm information already known or easily accessed. • Only 5.2 % of the questions gather company intelligence. • Fewer than 0.6% of the questions focus on gathering industry intelligence. Locked details the new approach first proposed in our best selling book, Economic Development: Marketing for Results!, provides a new conceptual framework for increasing the strategic value of information gathered through the business retention process. View the complete article in Adobe Acrobat