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Big Ideas for Small Business in Crete: Hersonissos, Crete -- Johanna Looye stops at a table displaying bottles of wine and other bottles of alcohol in the village of Achanus and voices her approval -- not because she plans to drink it but because the collection represents a broad array of Greek-made products.
Looye is one of four planners serving with the 24-member University of Cincinnati team that, this summer, is providing a concentrated effort and the wide-ranging expertise needed to help solve the
problems of mass tourism in Hersonissos, a coastal city in north central Crete. Hersonissos, about a 40-minute air flight south of
Athens, used to be a small village of fruit warehouses. Today, especially during the popular summer vacation months of June, July
and August, it is a crowded tourist hot spot boasting a sea front filled with concrete hotels, nightclubs and shops, water parks,
go-cart tracks and mini-soccer complexes.
In just three short decades, tourism has grown to dominate the town's economy at the same time that agriculture is declining.
While Hersonissos boasts about 5,000 permanent residents, it houses more than 50,000 beds, according to UC team members. Most of those beds are filled with young European vacationers who love the night life, but only from April to October each year.
Thus, during the fall, many of the permanent residents harvest the crops from olive trees and fruit orchards covering the hillsides
and coastal plain. But more and more, young residents are leaving and not coming back. Thus, the traditional Cretan way of life is
disappearing.
Looye's job this summer has been to identify ways in which the municipality, a newly formed governmental unit containing more than a dozen villages ranging in size from about 5000 in the main city to about seven or eight families in smaller villages, can diversify
its economy with alternative forms of business. That's why the idea of Greek wine, ouzo and the popular , "raki," the potent libation
made from grape residue left from winemaking, is so exciting to her. They represent ways in which the Cretans can turn local assets
into business enterprises in ways that build on tourism. She also wants to find ways to help Hersonissos' economy become less
dependent on the volatile tourist trade.
In recent weeks she has been interviewing business owners, residents and government-supported agencies to find out as much as
she can about business in Hersonissos. For example, she spent a recent morning interviewing a Greek woman who is the second in
command in a development corporation in nearby Achanus (pronounced "a-ha-nus"), a town now considered one of Europe's best
traditional-looking villages.
The entire UC team also had dinner with the mayor of Achanus and toured the village on July 13. An expert on micro-enterprises
(usually one-person small businesses), Looye, a UC associate professor of planning, has expertise that has been utilized much closer to home in Cincinnati, serving with the City of Cincinnati and Smart Money Financial Services to provide business training as part of the program to revive the historic Findlay Market in Over-the-Rhine and serving on the Board of Directors of the Cincinnati Business Incubator.
She has also traveled before this six-week Crete research trip to destinations such as Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Latin America in
similar endeavors. She served as a visiting fellow at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand, in fall 1998 and worked with the
UC Summer Faculty Development Project in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 1998.
In Hersonissos, she has discovered there is little institutional support for micro-, small, and medium enterprises. "There simply
are none of the institutions we take for granted to support small business," she said. The eight banks in Hersonissos don't offer
business loans and focus instead on services such as savings and checking accounts. The closest banks for business loans are in the
capital, Heraklion, about a 30-minute drive away. The governmental agencies that exist focus on registration of businesses, rather
than business support and training.
Looye, who has served on the faculty in UC's College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning for 10 years, is recommending the
establishment of a business center that would try to fill that gap, providing services needed by small businesses as well as management to support a business park. The center would offer one-stop shops for business registration and paperwork, shared services, a "buy-local" promotional program and support business associations. It would house a small business incubator to nurture local entrepreneurs, provide shared rental space for businesses with shared fax and photocopying services, as well as meeting rooms.
Her recommendations also call for a business park for large and small-scale manufacturing and bio-tech endeavors, possibly linked to University of Crete's work in that arena.
In addition, she is suggesting training and informational meetings in the villages to provide education on how to start and
operate traditional businesses such as ceramics, basket-making, beekeeping, winemaking and other crafts.
Working with her has been Chris Ruthemeyer, an undergraduate planning student, who credits Looye with quadrupling his economic knowledge in the past few weeks.
Although it may not be a part of her formal presentation, Looye's has some ideas that put a Greek twist on wine-tasting. She
thinks Hersonissos should create olive tasting, which would draw on the region's agricultural strengths while complementing the
tourist trade. "The varieties and flavors of olives are practically like wine tasting," she said. "I think that would be a fun way
to serve tourists in a way that employs local assets very well."
For more stories on UC's research in Crete, go to http://www.uc.edu/crete/credef.htm.
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