Business location projects rejected by the local population, competition between economic activities due to the scarcity of resources such as water or land, small and medium-sized businesses highly vulnerable to the energy crisis, companies struggling to recruit… Today’s economic developers have to deal with problems that go well beyond the strict perimeter of the economy, and also cover ecological, social, urban planning, health and other dimensions. What, and how, do they need to learn in order to break out of their silos, and support the transition of businesses in their territories and the evolution of visions of economic development, beyond the mere paradigms of attractiveness and competitiveness?
In January 2025, Cnam, Intercommunalités de France and ANCT launched the first class of a new Territorial Economic Developer training program. In 6 sessions, the aim is to equip these agents with a wide range of profiles to meet today’s challenges. Taking Rebonds’ lessons as a starting point, we acted as observers to help identify ways in which the program could be better adapted to the challenges and needs of participants and their local authorities.
In concrete terms, we conducted 4 to 5 sessions with the participants to collect together the variety of their initial challenges and issues; to understand the way in which they did, or did not, mobilize the training content; to share the lessons learned from Rebonds and collect their reactions. This stage highlighted the fact that, while the need to clarify the vision of economic development was a recurring challenge, going beyond a technical approach, crossing economic, social and environmental paradigms, and becoming more reflexive about development models remained difficult in the daily lives of agents and in the training content; while facilitation, intermediation and diplomacy were part of the range of new roles to be adopted (between businesses in the region, between local authorities, within government departments, etc.), there was a lack of space for experimentation. ), there is a lack of space for fine-tuning a form of cooperative maturity.While all participants are aware of the need to change their practices and the policies they implement, adopting a trial-and-error, experimental approach also requires new skills.
What might the model for the next promotion look like? Together with the participants, we produced a maturity grid for economic developers, based on 4 areas of work:
- Vision(s): to be able to better project your region’s future economic policy (5, 10, 15, 20 years and beyond).
- Systemic: to be better able to link economic, ecological and social dimensions in order to invent new levers for change.
- Cooperation: being able to project oneself into more open, renewed and inclusive economic development bodies
- Experimentation: be able to test economic development policies more systematically with their users
This grid could be tested, for example:
- to communicate about the training andclarify the transformation trajectory proposed to participants, as part of an instruction manual for getting the most out of the course
- to helpthe teaching team build a common thread between the various presentations, to restate the teaching objectives and program content, and to better address ecological and social issues in training;
- help participants to better identify their areas for improvement, and to work through the training issues with their colleagues (e.g. as a logbook to enable participants to keep track of what they’ve learned and their questions).
Finally, Rebonds poses the hypothesis of taking an experimental approach to economic development policies; it would therefore seem useful to us to inject this same experimental approach into training courses: for example, moving away from a succession of plenary lectures (of high quality, but with limited scope for adaptation and little room for reflexivity) to leave more time for peer work and practical application: time for surveys, codevs, etc. This would be a good way to get the most out of our training programs.