Transforming your EDO

The design of the earliest motor cars departed as little as possible from those of horse-drawn carts. It was decades before innovators realised that a ‘horseless carriages’ didn’t have to look like their predecessors and something resembling the modern car was born.

In similar fashion, Economic Development Organisations are being challenged by transformative technologies, particularly GenAI. Taking the approach of simply automating processes or creating new efficiencies is both a failure of imagination and losing sight of the fundamental challenge. The age of AI should be forcing EDOs to rethink what they do and not just how they do it. Whilst the destination of economic prosperity might be the same, the journey to get these should look very different.

But this isn’t only a story about technology. The mandate of a typical EDO has quietly expanded. Some teams have merged while others have separated and, increasingly, units with differing briefs are expected to operate as one coherent function. Export support, investment attraction, business growth, tourism, innovation and place marketing are coming together with shared goals and broader economic objectives. At the same time, the resources to deliver this expanded mandate have not been matched. Budgets are tighter, technology integration is patchy and legacy organisational structures are spread thin.

In locations such as the UK and US, this is not just a hypothetical pressure, it is already showing up through structural change. In the UK, the shift towards Mayoral Combined Authorities is rewriting how economic development is organised and funded at a regional level. The new Burnham premiership seems set to accelerate the devolution agenda. In the US, State governments are feeling the pressure for organisational change and recent increases in the commissioning of transformation work testify to that. In the Middle East, EDOs are shifting from purely public funding models toward blended public-private structures that demand different governance and accountability altogether.

There are two forces accelerating these changes. Geopolitics is reshaping where investment and trade flow, forcing EDOs to compete harder and respond faster than their structures were built for. And yes, the other is a technological revolution being driven by AI, changing what good looks like and putting pressure on being more efficient. Manual processes, poor data capture and siloed activity must become things of the past.

An IEDC survey of economic development professionals across the US and internationally indicated that practitioners are acknowledging the challenges and change happening in the industry. Nearly half of practitioners (46%) see the field as “stable but facing emerging challenges,” while 28% see it as “in transition and undergoing change”.

Putting all of this together raises a crucial question for EDO leaders. Is my organisation ready for the future? Four shifts capture where this question hits hardest.

From working in silos to integrated growth

Most EDOs don’t set out to be siloed. It happens organically with a trade team here, an investment team there, an innovation team tacked on. These teams often have their own systems, KPIs and ways of working. Whilst they may look like they’re under the same banner on an org chart, the reality is that they rarely share intelligence, often duplicate effort and are possibly having conversations with the same businesses without realising.

An EDO that can’t connect the dots is leaving potential value on the table. Approaching a business or event or campaign from different angles, all saying slightly different things, demonstrates a disconnect and lack of credibility for an EDO.

Bringing these teams together and creating organisational harmony is not a case of reorganisation for its own sake. This is about using organisational structure to create connected client journeys from start to finish, campaigns that all sing from the same hymn sheet and governance that acknowledges the synergies between teams rather than the differences.

From measuring activity to measuring impact

If you were to ask an EDO how they performed last year, you would tend to get an answer along the lines of “we generated this many leads, hosted this many missions, attended this many events”. As soon as you start to dig deeper and ask what difference that activity made, the answers become vaguer and vaguer.

This used to be accepted practice because often the impact of economic development work was measured in activity more than impact. Measuring impact is harder, true. However, as the data gets easier to collect and analyse, there is increased pressure for EDOs to demonstrate the tangible impact they have on national, regional and local economies.

Combine this with more integrated teams with integrated targets and you see the need for an overhaul of how “success” was measured in the past. KPIs tied to outcomes not outputs and intelligence that supports real decisions are the order of the day for holding EDOs accountable for the activity they undertake.

From information to intelligence

AI and a general increase in access to data mean that individuals and businesses have more information at their fingertips than ever before, and without needing an EDO to provide it. It often feels like every EDO is telling the same story to the same audience, making differentiation harder and harder to spot.

What you can’t replicate, however, is true intelligence. A genuine and real-time understanding of what an investor needs to make a decision, what an exporter needs to break into a market, what’s actually happening in key industries and supply chains a region depends on. In this case, AI should not act as a replacement for expertise but enhance EDOs’ ability to do their core functions better. More direct targeting, faster synthesis of market signals and sharper insight into a client’s actual problem. Pair this with the first-hand intelligence gathered by engaging with those in your ecosystem and EDOs suddenly reshape themselves into being genuinely “intelligence-led”.

EDOs that go on to perform the best won’t be the ones that shout the loudest, they’ll be the ones that know more, faster about the people and businesses they’re trying to serve.

From restructuring to reimagining

EDOs are restructuring constantly. This can often feel like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic rather than striving for meaningful change. The cyclical nature of the industry can often cause genuine disruption to operations, but more importantly, genuine disruption to EDOs delivering economic growth.

The underlying problem is usually how these transformation activities are sequenced, rather than ambition. A one-off restructure treats transformation as an event rather than a capability. It rarely accounts for the skills gaps the new structure assumes, or the fact that the tools and ways of working it’s designed around keep shifting underneath it.

A structure built for today’s assumptions is already behind by the time it’s implemented. The alternative is treating transformation as a roadmap rather than a moment, assessing the current state honestly, prioritising the changes that build momentum early, sequencing the harder structural work over a realistic timeline and building the capability to sustain it.

None of these shifts can be ignored if EDOs want to both survive and thrive going forwards. They are critical to whether an EDO’s structure, its measurement systems, its operating model and its approach to change are built for the mandate it now carries, or for the mandate it used to have.

So four questions are worth asking before the next funding cycle, the next leadership change or the next restructure answers them for you.

• Does our structure connect the client journey, or fragment it?
• Do our metrics prove impact, or just count activity?
• Do we know more than the people we serve, and do we know it faster?
• Is transformation something we do once, or something we are built to sustain?

Economic development is not a zero-sum game but it is competitive. The greatest rewards will fall to the EDOs that don’t just try to design a better horseless carriage but to those that reinvent the journey altogether.