investing in additional efforts to nurture and sustain its entrepreneurial culture, offering free business classes and marketing assistance to residents and incentives like meal tax incentives, façade improvements, and signage programs to small businesses.

Ultimately, Wytheville’s effort to boost entrepreneurship is not just about the winners of the business competition or other downtown Wytheville business owners—it is about improving the quality of life and access to quality places for an entire community. While such efforts cannot erase the geographic and demographic challenges Wytheville and other small rural towns like it face, they are helping to drive small-scale, regionally inclusive economic growth and showing the importance of centering people and place when doing so.

Note: Downtown Wytheville, Inc. is a part of Main Street America, a national network of more than1,600 neighborhoods and communities who share a commitment to creating high-quality places and to building stronger communities through preservation-based economic development.

Dr. Jackson Nickerson is a nonresident senior fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings. Nickerson is also the Frahm Family Professor of Organization and Strategy at Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis. Nickerson was the associate dean and director of Brookings Executive Education from 2009 to 2017 and is an expert in leadership development in government as well as business strategy, strategic planning processes, and strategy execution.

He is the author of Leading Change from the Middle, Tackling Wicked Government Problems, and Leading Change in a Web 2.1 World, all of which are published by Brookings Press. He also authored Leading in Government: Practical advice to leadership questions