Virginia is better at the traditional economic development game — recruiting outside corporate investment — than just about anyone. The Virginia Economic Development Partnership is highly regarded nationally, as are several of Virginia’s regional economic development organizations. But is that good enough to sustain prosperity in the 21st century?

In my “Economy 4.0” series, I’ve argued that we need to move from a “safari hunting” economic development model — bagging the big game and bringing it home — to a “tending the garden” approach of nurturing and growing start-up companies, and even beyond, to a model organized around the principles of creativity, innovation and energy/environmental sustainability.

I did a lot of digging for my latest piece, “Dead End.” I found, to my surprise, that there’s still a lot of life left in the old corporate-recruitment paradigm. In the years 2004 and 2005, Virginia brought in as much outside investment as during the peak years of the Internet bubble. But economic development successes have been a lot harder to find the past two years, possibly foretelling a long-term downturn in the effectiveness of this strategy. Personally, I believe that we have milked that cow for all she’s got, and it’s time to move on to the next one.

But, as the old saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” For a long time, Virginia’s economic development machinery appeared to be working just fine, so everyone was comfortable just fine-tuning the old model. But I argue that traditional strategies are leaving a lot of money on the table. Corporate expansion and relocation announcements, I estimate, accounted for only 10 percent of all business investment in Virginia over the past 10 years. Where’s the other 90 percent coming from? How can we get more of it?

While VEDP keeps careful track of all corporate expansions, including many that never get announced publicly, no one in state government is gathering the metrics of the knowledge economy — at least not where it can be accessed in one place. How many new businesses are being created? How many receive venture capital funding? How many companies launched Initial Public Offerings, or raised capital in public equity markets? How much R&D takes place in Virginia? How many patents are issued? How many fast-growth companies do we have? How well do the skills and education of our workforce match the emerging needs of the industries of the future?

Ironically, the best place to answer most of those questions isn’t any source in Virginia — it’s in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Technology Collaborative does collect and publish knowledge-economy data for the Bay state and nine other “leading technology states,” including Virginia. Needless to say, that information is not disseminated widely in the Old Dominion. (I was tipped off to it by Pete Jobse, CEO of the Center for Innovative Technology.) The lack of Virginia-specific data is a pretty sad story: If we can’t accurately describe our economy, how can our political, civic and business leaders possibly do an intelligent job of devising policy for it?