UNH Cooperative Extension launched its inaugural Economic Development Academy (EDA) in 2014 at UNH Manchester. Last year's participants included economic development practitioners, county managers, and economic development organization/agency staff. This presentation was given by Jim Damicis of Camoin Associates on trends in economic development.

1. “Recent Trends and the Future of Economic
Development”
Prepared for Economic Development Academy
August 24 2015
Presentation By:
Jim Damicis
Senior Vice President
jim@camoinassociates.com
www.camoinassociates.com
Twitter: @jdamicis
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/jdamicis
Blog: www.camoinassociates.com/blog/
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2. Economic Trends
•Small is the new Big
•Resurgence of manufacturing
•Intersection/blending of sectors - NAICS codes no
longer make sense making traditional “targeting”
difficult
•Health, personal and businesses services continue
on the rise
•Amazon effect – changing retail and logistics
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3. Technology Trends
•Gigabit demand –delivering a gig of speed is the
new goal. Demand being driven by:
• Mobile consumerism, governance, etc…
• Cloud based services
• Big data
• 3-D printing and related manufacturing technologies
• User content provision – uploading data, videos, audio, etc…
• Tele-health
• Entrepreneurs and small businesses
•Demand for redundancy, reliability, and
choice/competition
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4. Workforce Trends
•Growth of the independent workers
•Workforce is regional/not local
•Diversity – immigration – movement from problem
to be dealt with to economic opportunity
•No one answer - all of these are important:
• Service jobs
• Middle skills jobs
• High tech
• Technical and soft skills
•Lifelong blended learning – traditional as well as
non-tradition higher education
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5. Placed Based Economic Development
•Geography still maters: access to workers/talent,
access to market, housing, transportation and
logistics, and digital infrastructure & culture
•High quality, diverse amenities - attract and retain
workforce
•Buy local, regional sourcing, local and regional
branding
•Sustainability and resiliency
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6. Financing Trends
•Continued pressure on state and local budgets
means less public funds to support economic
development
•Growing skepticism of tax credits and incentives
•Growth of crowdfunding (also tied to
crowdsourcing)
•Growth in private funding and continuation of
public/private partnerships
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7. The Role of the Economic Developer and
Economic Development Organization
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 Economic developer as point guard – able to distribute
work and responsibilities to those best able to act
 Able to function regionally
 Reliance on information, knowledge, and intelligence
 Higher demand for transparency, nontraditional civic
engagement/involvement – crowdsourcing, and social
media
 Demand for metrics
 Adaptability – comfort with chaos and complexity

8. Lessons from the Field
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 Don’t bite off more than you can chew! Break large projects
into smaller digestible components based on your organization’s
and partners’ capacity to implement
 Get comfortable making collective decisions without perfect
information and predictable outcomes
 Give collaboration and engagement within region, diverse
stakeholders, and the public more than lip service – design and
implement together
 Market externally AND Internally
 Understand what you can have impact over – i.e. at local level
you can impact land-use, zoning, permitting, customer service

9. Questions/Comments?
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