The Number Factory

Many of Minnesota Implan Group’s 1,500 to 1,800 clients couldn’t afford to do such data gathering and analysis on their own. But Implan is quite affordable. The software runs on any PC, and costs just $450. Data sets cost from $175 to $2,200, depending on their geographic scope. (Training in how to use these tools costs from $1,050 to $4,900 for an organization’s first six trainees, depending on whether the sessions are held at Minnesota Implan Group’s offices or at the customer’s location, but training is not mandatory in any event.)

Lindall won’t disclose his company’s revenues, but says the market it serves is relatively small—maybe even in the single-digit millions. He estimates that the business has been growing by about 10 percent annually in recent years (though it will be flat for 2007). That’s been thanks in part to the lack of much direct competition—just the government’s RIMS II offering, a few university research groups, and a business that Lindall says charges 20 to 30 times what MIG does.

“There is nobody I’m aware of that does what we do,” Lindall says. “Because of the way we price Implan and our ability to train people, a lot of the market growth for this kind of thing is simply because we are there and provide the product.”

The main spur to growth, he adds, is that “as more and more people do these kinds of economic impact studies, other people see them and they want to do them. That’s probably the biggest thing. We’ve got so many people from different walks of life doing this kind of stuff, and it can be applied to almost anything.”

But Implan’s accessibility and ease of use also make it a target of criticism by some economists, who charge that in the wrong hands, the software—or any input-output model—will produce inflated results at best, and at worst, completely ridiculous projections. Despite Lindall and Olson’s emphasis on training, in the end, anyone can point and click their way to an outcome without fully understanding the economics in which the tool is grounded and without knowing how to look at data sets with a nuanced eye.

David Swenson, a researcher in the Department of Economics at Iowa State University, is actually a fan of Implan. “Implan is a wonderful tool for regional analysis,” he writes in an e-mail. “The data that either go into or are derived in the Implan process are reliable, accessible, changeable, and quite knowable.”

But Swenson cites numbers generated in recent years by the Minnesota Department of Agriculture as an example of what can go wrong if Implan users aren’t knowledgeable, don’t have good data, or have a vested interest in getting a certain result. The department claimed that ethanol production is projected to have a $4.95 billion economic impact on Minnesota and generate 18,000 jobs in the state in 2008.