History
Business Leaders for Michigan (BLM), the state's business roundtable, is an organization dedicated to making Michigan a “Top Ten” state for job, economic, and personal income growth. The organization is composed exclusively of the chairpersons, chief executives or most senior executives of the state’s largest job providers and universities. Together, our members power nearly one-quarter of the state’s economy and educate nearly one-half of the state's university students. Our members are the economic engine that helps keep Michigan moving.
Our organization’s roots are in Detroit. First founded in the 1970s, BLM existed for decades as southeast Michigan-based Detroit Renaissance, a regionally-based business roundtable. Given the economic challenges experienced by the State of Michigan as a whole, however, our expansion to a statewide organization in 2009 was natural. We now emphasize the development and expansion of jobs, and economic growth across the entire state.
2010 Accomplishments
Public Awareness
In 2010, we made great progress in advancing awareness of and support for our Michigan Turnaround Plan that garnered endorsements from nearly every major news publication and support from 75 percent of the public that was aware of the Plan.
We did this by:
- Hosting 16 regional forums around the state.
- Convening a Leadership Summit on the Fiscal Crisis in May, along with a Reform Summit in December in conjunction with The Center for Michigan.
- Running a statewide advertising campaign throughout the year.
- Ensuring candidates that support the Michigan Turnaround Plan were elected to political office in November 2010 by fully engaging our BLM Political Action Committee.
Public Policy Advocacy
By working closely with state leaders, BLM facilitated discussion that led to the adoption of state employee retirement and health care reforms that are projected to save Michigan taxpayers approximately $4 billion over the next ten years. These savings along with other less visible changes, such as broadening business input into revenue forecasting, developing legislation that would improve local collaboration and long-range fiscal planning are significant pieces of our turnaround plan.
Other efforts include:
- Conducting and publicizing a quarterly Business Leaders economic survey.
- Supporting business tax reforms that will help Michigan compete for jobs and encourage economic growth.
Strategic Initiatives
In addition to promoting and advocating one of the most ambitious economic action plans in Michigan’s history, we also made significant progress in advancing strategic initiatives to grow Michigan’s economy during 2010:
- Completed an annual benchmarking study documenting Michigan’s competiveness relative to other states.
- Formed a partnership with the University Research Corridor (URC) to help support plans to re-position Michigan economically. The partnership, known as Accelerate Michigan, is the one of the largest of its kind between a state’s largest businesses and its research universities. The purpose behind the partnership is to help stimulate economic growth, encourage entrepreneurial activity across the state, and put an international spotlight on Michigan as a hub for innovation. To support those goals, the following core activities are already underway through Accelerate Michigan:
- Championing entrepreneurship and innovation by sponsoring the Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition, one of the largest business plan competitions in the nation.
- Growing the capacity to bring ideas to the marketplace by supporting the Renaissance Venture Capital Fund (RVCF) and identifying opportunities to help Michigan-based innovative companies grow. RVCF is the largest privately-financed fund of funds in the nation.
- Identifying Michigan’s best opportunities to grow clusters of innovation based on university-industry R&D.
Legacy Initiatives
In 2010, progress was also made on three legacy initiatives from the former Detroit Renaissance’s "Road to Renaissance" program:
- Legislation was enacted that provided special incentives to help accelerate the development of the Detroit Region Aerotropolis —the largest economic development collaboration in the state. In the long term, it is projected to attract more than 60,000 jobs to the region and more than $10 billion of additional annual economic activity and production with an aggressive business attraction effort.
- Championed the work of the Detroit Creative Corridor Center, an initiative designed to increase the concentration of creative economy workers and businesses in downtown Detroit.
- Continued support of the Detroit News Hub, a collaborative media relations department for the Detroit region developed to communicate under-reported information.
