More than five years after the Birmingham Business Alliance launched Blueprint Birmingham, the BBA is working towards a new strategic plan, called Blueprint 20/20. For more on this and other stories, WBHM’s Rachel Osier Lindley spoke to Nick Patterson, editor of the weekly newspaper WELD. Patterson joins WBHM most Thursdays during All Things Considered.
Brian Hilson, president and chief executive officer of the Birmingham Business Alliance, tells WELD:
We’ve developed a new strategic plan. We’ve talked generally about the plan in public meetings, but we have not released the whole plan and don’t plan to. We don’t want our competitors to know exactly what we are doing. However, we are glad to talk generally about what we are doing, but we won’t be doing that until the appropriate time.
I will tell you the new plan will be called Blueprint 20/20. It’s another five-year strategy. We’ve had significant success with Blueprint Birmingham, so naturally we are following a lot of that. With the new plan we’ve adopted a cluster approach to economic development instead of targeting industry sectors for recruitment purposes.
We’ve identified eight business clusters that are our strongest. The cluster approach was created by Harvard professor Michael Porter. Essentially it says if you build your strengths, such as workforce, around a business cluster, which is a group of related industries, chances of growing those are greater than if we target those individually.