To do so, they have a keen eye on small business development.  In a recent blog entry, John Moon, Assistant Director of Capital Formation in Living Cities, identifies the key findings of the small business framing paper. Specifically, they find that small businesses are so diverse that a "one size fits all" approach to addressing their needs is not sufficient.

Small Business: One Size Does Not Fit All

By: John Moon

As the country and policy makers focus on job creation and economic revitalization, they eventually look to small businesses. There are strong reasons to do so. Almost 99% of all US firms are small businesses (defined by the Small Business Administration as firms with fewer than 500 employees); they contribute 50% of the US GDP and are the source of most new job creation. Besides creating jobs, small businesses also help build the local tax-base, create and contribute to a sense of place, and provide an important source of wealth creation. Hence, if you want to address unemployment and improve economic vitality, strategies that support small businesses must be considered.

Finding ways to foster the success of small business is on the agenda for Living Cities’ Integration Initiative (TII) sites (Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, and Minneapolis/St Paul). However, the sites face the challenge of developing strategies that recognize the fact that small businesses are extremely diverse and take many forms: from the immigrant food cart to the small plumbing shop, from the 30-person advertising firm to a rapidly growing biomedical technology company. Although small businesses share a common set of needs: access to customers, capital, management skills, networks and supportive local governments, meeting these needs requires approaches that distinguish among the diversity of small business types.

To read the entire blog entry, and the findings from the report, click here.