This Collaborative Economic Development (CED) initiative began from the recognition that the communities working in cooperation would provide a greater market impact than operating on their own.
To date, EBP has provided overarching strategic and capacity building assistance and has also developed three specific technical toolsets:
- EBP leveraged experience from our TREDIS and economic impact modeling practices to develop a bespoke cloud-based Return on Investment model that will allow municipalities to estimate the positive revenue impacts on potential shared development, allowing for more informed cost-sharing agreements.
- EBP has also examined the global competitive landscape, the Alberta legal framework, and economic development best practices to develop a business attraction policy toolkit – including limited incentives. Each set of tools is specifically tailored to the common business needs of each target business sector.
- Finally, EBP is also working with the municipalities to develop a site identification and prioritization model to evaluate candidate sites based on their current suitability and match to the specific needs of the target sectors. This GIS-based tool will be available in each of the municipalities, will enable collaboration between the municipalities, and allow for ongoing updates as new data becomes available.