Municipal economic development strategic planning – framework and benefits

In today’s complex economic landscape, restoring the momentum of economic expansion and investment is at the forefront of every public official’s concerns. Whether attracting growth to maximize opportunity built around community strengths or accounting for the many unknowns caused by major disruptions, a robust economic development strategy is essential to the recovery of virtually every city, county, regional government and development organization in the United States.

An integrated planning process that incorporates custom research and analysis, stakeholder engagement, deep market understanding and sector-specific insights can position public organizations for accelerated recovery and sustained growth. The result is an economic development strategic plan that lays the foundation to help communities direct efforts and resources toward a clearly defined vision for the future.

Economic development planning framework

Economic development strategic planning is critical to shaping a vibrant and economically competitive environment for the future of a community or region. Often, effective strategy development is as much about understanding what the organization will not do as what it will do. Accordingly, the best economic development plans focus on leveraging assets and strengths rather than overcoming challenges, and are characterized by a sharp focus on the community’s unique economic role, key clusters of opportunity, workforce characteristics, quality of life and other economic and demographic differentiators.

The steps involved in a strategic economic development planning process follow a structured sequence of phases and tasks:

• Define – This phase involves project start-up activities including creating an overall governance structure, assembling the planning team, gathering relevant data, identifying key stakeholders and developing a plan for their involvement.
• Discover – This is the primary data collection phase of the planning effort, and the most resource-intensive. It includes extensive market research, multimodal stakeholder engagement and baseline assessments to establish the factual foundation for subsequent steps in the planning process.