Our experience teaches that traditional strategic planning is not the right approach to designing and guiding regional innovation ecosystems. It is simply too slow and unresponsive to keep up with the opportunities that quickly develop in a dynamic regional economy. In short, it is the wrong tool for the job. Economic development organizations need agility to spot rapidly emerging opportunities and move on them. Equally important, as economic development organizations now have the potential to multiply their impact. In other words, they can be far more productive with their investments. How? By intentionally designing and guiding new collaborations.
Making the Jump to What’s Next in Economic Development
In sum, economic development organizations need to “jump the curve” with a new approach to strategy. To fill the gap in strategy practice, we have developed a unique approach that can accelerate the evolution of these ecosystems. Called Strategic Doing, this approach is fast, agile and low-cost. With the discipline in place, economic development organizations can design and guide complex collaborations toward measurable outcomes and make quick adjustments as they learn by doing. Building complex collaborations — the collaborations that compose a dynamicinnovation ecosystem — becomes easier and faster.