Technology and Community Building

Chicago neighborhoods face many challenges; chief among them is economic development and job creation because in many communities small businesses are the greatest source of new employment. Strengthening existing small businesses is essential for increased economic opportunity for residents as small businesses generated 70 percent of new jobs annually in the U.S. over the past decade, but are often disadvantaged by the lack of access to resources such as skills, knowledge and information that larger businesses routinely use to grow and succeed. An Urban Institute study reported that minority- and women-owned small businesses are not as profitable as they could be because of a lack of technology utilization. Nationally, these small businesses could realize $200 billion in additional revenue if technology use were increased.

Today, it remains a massive, untapped opportunity.

My work at IBM is about applying IBM technologies to the specific needs of Chicago communities. Recently we have been working to develop and refine the SME Toolkit, www.smetoolkit.org, a free resource to Chicago community entrepreneurs to provide access to new markets, capital, and knowledge to grow businesses. Content is organized into seven categories: accounting and finance, business planning, human resources, legal and insurance, marketing and sales, operations and technology.

I am personally thrilled by new internet marketing and exporting components in the toolkit, because building an effective online presence is critical in communities that have been underserved in the internet era. The toolkit includes an e-commerce enabled web site development program to help small businesses sell the same goods they sell locally both on-line and internationally. Another important tool is a function that calculates the costs, profitability, and return on investment for online marketing campaigns, a very new way of helping Chicago small businesses leverage the internet.

Technology of course, is merely an enabler. Real change must come from building connections between small businesses, large corporations, community groups, and government agencies to create economic opportunity outside of traditional economic sectors to produce effective solutions for neighborhoods that have endured decades of underemployment and insufficient capital. The challenge moving ahead is to provide vital information to community-based entrepreneurs and assist them in building connections; they are the ultimately the most effective tools we have to reduce economic inequality.