Economic Development and Competitiveness Strategic Plan Services

The vendor is required to provide economic development and competitiveness strategic plan to guide inclusive statewide economic growth over the next 4 years and beyond.
- Strategic plan shall be focused on inclusive growth opportunities and include:
• Identify state competitive advantages, growth opportunities, and emerging risks and constraints to meeting growth opportunities;
• Establish a framework to support priority sector growth, innovation, and investment attraction;
• Propose evidence-based, well-defined interventions to further inclusive economic development across regions and populations, including rural communities, tribal nations, and historically marginalized populations;
• Recommend actionable policy, programmatic, and investment priorities; and
• Develop an implementation roadmap of those priorities with specific, measurable outcome and performance metrics.
- Requirement:
1. Economic competitiveness assessment
• Review of peer state and regional economic development plans;
• Benchmarking against peer states and relevant international competitors on key metrics, including an analysis of publicly available data on business creation, closure, moving out of state, moving in state;
• Evaluation of industry competitiveness and growth potential/market opportunities;
• Identify constraints to competitiveness and key gaps, including assessment of innovation ecosystems, workforce needs, infrastructure, and the business enabling environment; and
• Identify key economic development opportunities and cross-cutting priorities to increase competitiveness.
• In the case that commerce manages to access business survey data of 100-600 respondents, contractor should incorporate analysis of data provided.
2. Partner engagement and consultation
• Design and facilitate inclusive stakeholder engagement and consultation process to create and validate assessment findings and inform strategic priorities.
• These volunteer groups meet on a monthly basis and they may continue throughout the strategic planning process.
• Engagement activities may include qualitative and quantitative research such as in-depth interviews, focus groups, workshops, listening sessions, and surveys.
• Consultation may include engagement with local and regional economic development organizations, labor organizations, tribal economic development entities, industry associations, educational and research institutions, community-based organizations, and representatives of rural and historically marginalized communities.
• The engagement process should seek to identify tribal economic development priorities, opportunities for partnership, and strategies that support tribal economic sovereignty and self-determination.
3. Development of the statewide economic development and competitiveness strategic plan
• Examination of such factors as demographics, workforce characteristics, industry landscape, and regional and tribal economics, infrastructure, and assets.
• Assessment of state global trade position, export opportunities, foreign direct investment potential, innovation ecosystem strengths, entrepreneurship activity, and research commercialization opportunities.
• Analysis of future workforce demand, labor market trends, demographic shifts, and talent pipeline requirements for priority industries.
• Recommendations to address priority opportunities, including addressing associated priority cross-cutting constraints, such as workforce development and retention, innovation and technology adoption, entrepreneurship, supply chain and cluster development, export growth, investment attraction, regulatory constraints, access to sites and infrastructure, housing availability, energy availability, and other barriers identified through analysis and stakeholder engagement.