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Keith Elwood - Marketing Geography
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| “My freshman year in college, I took a course in physical geography, fell in love with subject, and decided that I have always been a geographer,” says Keith Elwood, president and founder of The Lime Kiln Group located in Victoria, British Columbia. The Lime Kiln Group, which is named after a nearby lighthouse, does consulting, strategic planning, market research, and geospatial project management. Elwood has recently finished a project assisting Elections British Columbia, which is a government electoral agency. “We started with street address data and we finished by redefining the roughly 8000 voter areas,” says Elwood, “ The result was an automated electoral boundary assignment system that is immediately responsive to changes in the landscape, follows all relevant legislation and regulations, and provides the best possible districting for the voters and government alike and to save time.” Sometimes, The Lime Kiln Group helps companies commercialize a technology or software. “Frequently companies that are really good with technology are really bad with marketing,” say Elwood, “The secret to marketing is to ask a few questions and then to listen real hard to the customer.” Running your own business takes lots of patience, problem solving, but the rewards are great. “My work is very satisfying to me because I am building things that weren’t there before,” says Elwood, ”In terms of my own company and in terms of using a tool that I am familiar with in a brand new way to solve a customer’s problem.” Elwood didn’t always know that one day he’d own his own business. As an undergraduate, Elwood wanted to study forestry and geology, but what he really wanted was a broad education, which led him to geography. “Geographers have the luxury of being perhaps the last academic discipline that really allows you to be liberally educated,” says Elwood, “Geography is a field that defies stereotypes.” Elwood sees how the whole world fits into geography. “In the early 1800s, Hegel divided up the world by all things studied through the framework of time, which is history, and all things studied through the framework of space, which is geography,” says Elwood, “Then everything else went into one of the two.” “I see geography as the framework that any discipline is hung on and as a superset that lays on top of the work that I do,” continues Elwood, “it is as much a perspective as it is a subject matter, but I think we’ve done a terrible job of marketing it.” Elwood advises students take as many classes as possible and to be flexible.< “Study statistics, calculus, English, and computer science because those are tools that we definitely need today,” says Elwood, “I’m very concerned to see the level that some business and engineering curricula have gotten to where foreign language ceases to be a requirement, so I would encourage students to learn languages.” Along with learning languages, Elwood also advises students to take business courses. “I have gotten my Master’s degree in geography without having to learn any basic business operations or issues,” says Elwood, “Geographers need to learn that we have the ability to break through the barriers that divide disciplines and be engineers, mathematicians, statisticians, linguists, writers, conversationalists, salespersons, and accountants.” Elwood applies core geographic principles in his work everyday. “I use geography all the time from when I’m persuading a client, writing a report, solving a problem, seeing a challenge in a new way, to reengineering a customer's business plan,” says Elwood, “ I call it, ‘standing outside the focus of the lens,’ and it is hard to underestimate the value of such a vantage point.” “My
work is dramatically rewarding, marvelously varied, and interesting Keith Elwood is a geographer who is building his own business, redrawing boundaries, and passionately marketing geography. Information gathered from an interview on Dec. 10, 1998 at 10 am EST
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