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• Innovation-Led Economic Development

Innovation-Led Economic Development Services

Innovation Deployed

Innovation is now the currency for competitive advantage, and not just in the Silicon Valley or Research Triangle. Businesses, nonprofit organizations, and governments everywhere must seek out and integrate creative ideas to survive and thrive. RTI uses state-of-the-art approaches to help you find, leverage, link—or create—sources of innovation to transform your community. That's innovation—deployed.

Robust and vibrant economies are built on vision, collaboration, and capacity for innovation—the ability to constantly find and integrate new ideas. But all too often, organizations form strategies based solely on past successes and historical data.

Our innovation-led economic development team—comprising economic development experts, scientists, and engineers, all on the cutting edge in their respective fields—can help your community move beyond strategies rooted in the past to craft a roadmap to the future. We can provide your community:

• Vision—Needs analysis and facilitated ideation to generate creative ideas to solve tough problems
• Market intelligence—Forward-looking analysis from a technical team that looks at your community's assets in the context of market trajectories
• Innovation scouting—Best practice research that identifies the innovators within and outside your community—whether you seek innovation in science and technology, innovation in organizational management, innovation in public policy, or all of the above
• Partneship development—Leverage of resources and organizational strengths to forge partnerships to move your strategies into implementation
• Performance tracking and reporting—Metrics to track progress, measure impact, calculate return on investment, and communicate the success of your initiatives

Our Capabilities

Our innovation-led economic development advisory services cover three broad areas:

• Strategic planning and policy development—We analyze and evaluate community assets (e.g., economic, social, innovation related) to develop broad-reaching strategies to accelerate knowledge, wealth, and job creation.
• Industry, technology, and market assessments—We analyze industry and technology trends, assess community innovation assets, identify market opportunities, and develop specific action plans for supporting key industries and/or commercializing research.
• Program evaluation and benchmarking—We conduct a wide array of program and performance evaluations to track the progress of initiatives and to measure economic impact and return on investment.