You're in a meeting about childcare.
Not business attraction, not incentives, not site selection. Childcare. Three employers told you the same thing last quarter: they can't fill the second shift because parents can't find care after 6:00 p.m. So now you're at a table with the United Way, a hospital HR director, two daycare operators, and a county commissioner, trying to solve a problem that wasn't in your job description five years ago.
This is one example of how the economic development field is shifting.
In late 2024, the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) convened the Economic Development Research Partners, a body of executives from economic development organizations across the globe. Throughout that conversation, participants kept returning to the same theme: the field was demanding more from them, often in areas that have only recently become central to their role. Economic developers are, at their core, connectors. Today, they are connecting around childcare, housing, infrastructure and workforce development, topics that, while related, were not central to economic development practitioners a decade ago.
The role of an economic developer has always evolved, but over the past five years, that evolution has accelerated. In addition to the traditional work of business attraction, retention and expansion — helping companies locate, stay and grow — economic developers are now expected to convene and coordinate networks across sectors that were not previously part of their remit. They are being asked to bridge institutions, align incentives and manage issues that cut across social, economic and political systems.
Economic developers are being asked to manage systems, not just transactions.
IEDC hears this message consistently. The role of an economic developer is changing and so are the skills and expertise needed to be successful.
The Research Confirms It
In 2025, IEDC launched its first-ever 2025 State of the Field research project, meant to collect real-time feedback from the field. This is the first research of its kind on how practitioners are experiencing, working in and thinking about the field of economic development. Informed by nearly 700 practitioners and more than 150,000 data points, it shows a consistent pattern across community types, organization sizes and regions: economic developers describe a role that has expanded well beyond growth metrics. What is emerging is what the report calls systems stewardship: practitioners moving from programmatic delivery toward facilitating relationships, aligning incentives and coordinating regional strategies. Over 61 percent of respondents say that establishing and maintaining partnerships and networks is a core part of their work. They're connecting people, education, industry, infrastructure and governance in ways that support long-term stability and economic prosperity.
The Expanding Scope and Its Tensions
Economic development practitioners recognize the need to think systemically about talent pipelines, innovation ecosystems, housing, infrastructure and inclusive growth. However, they are mostly still operating within structures built for a different era, with performance frameworks that reward deals closed rather than systems improved.
61%
Economic developers are being asked to convene partners and align systems, often without matching increases in personnel, data or authority. The field isn't retreating from growth. It's grappling with how growth fits into outcomes that are harder to measure but impossible to ignore.
Over the next several years, the pressure will intensify. As federal resources for economic development pull back, and communities face demographic change, labor shortages and climate pressures, the demand for new approaches that tie these pieces together will rise. To meet those demands, economic developers will need structures, metrics and support that match the scope of what they're being asked to do.
What's Working: The Field's Critical Success Factors
The research surfaced what practitioners see as essential to making this expanded role work. Four factors stood out: collaboration and governance, regional networks and knowledge sharing, cross-sector partnerships, and entrepreneurship and innovation.
The field is grappling with outcomes that are harder to measure but impossible to ignore.
The numbers back this up. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) participate in regional or statewide economic development networks. Over half engage in regular meetings with peer organizations (57 percent) and joint initiatives (57 percent). Partnerships now span business retention and attraction (67 percent), site development (54 percent), access to capital (53 percent), and affordable housing (51 percent). And 36 percent identified entrepreneurship and innovation as a top opportunity for the field.
These factors point to a profession that has moved beyond individual deal-making toward collective capacity-building. Much of the work now depends on relationships, networks and the ability to coordinate across boundaries.
The Leadership Shift
Many organizations report limited analytic infrastructure, uneven data access and growing reliance on external partners to fill critical gaps. At the same time, experienced practitioners are exiting the field, and newer leaders are stepping into roles shaped by expectations their predecessors never encountered.
The next generation of economic development leaders will be defined less by mastery of incentives and more by the ability to interpret complex data, manage cross-sector relationships and operate effectively amid uncertainty. If economic development is increasingly about systems, leadership must be equipped to manage those systems and relationships, not just transactions.
What This Means
The future of economic development will not be about choosing between "traditional" and "modern" approaches. It will be about integrating them. Growth still matters, but so does how growth is generated, who benefits from it and whether the systems supporting it can last.
700
For practitioners, this means spending more time convening and coordinating, even when outcomes are incremental and difficult to quantify. It means using data as a learning tool rather than a performance shield, being explicit about trade-offs and reframing success as progress over time.
For organizations and policymakers, it means asking whether existing structures, incentives and metrics align with what the field is being asked to accomplish.
What is emerging is a shift from deal-making to systems stewardship.
The Final Takeaway
Economic development is no longer waiting to be redefined by theory or policy. The demands placed on practitioners by economic shifts and community needs are already reshaping how the field operates, often ahead of the systems meant to support them. IEDC’s State of the Field survey will be updated annually to continue identifying trends in a profession that continues to grow and change.
Over the next three to five years, the field's credibility will rest on how well it navigates complexity, how honestly it measures what matters and how clearly it communicates what progress actually looks like.