A world-class Economic Development Department committed to attracting and growing business and cultivating relationships that together create a thriving business environment.

Performance Improvement Summary

Economic Development’s primary focuses include the attraction of businesses to Louisville, expansion of the city’s existing businesses, and small business development.  The department, formerly known as Economic Growth & Innovation, was part of a groundbreaking reorganization in July 2014 that resulted in the creation of Louisville Forward.  Economic Development has explored several metrics related to attraction and expansion and has chosen the number of new jobs created and the average wage of those new jobs, for both completed deals and potential deals in the pipeline, as KPI’s to measure attraction and expansion efforts.  Identifying the most meaningful metrics for the department is challenging due to macro-economic factors affecting the local economy being outside of the control of the department.  Also, a primary component of the work of Economic Development is relationship-building, thus making it more difficult to measure performance.

Economic Development is rising to the challenge of finding the most appropriate and meaningful metrics.  Based on research and to align more closely with other economic metrics, the department changed from measuring its metrics monthly to quarterly.  Economic Development is improving the way it tracks information about its work by utilizing SalesForce, a software system that helps track economic information about the Economic Development team’s projects.  The department is currently reviewing the data collected in SalesForce and is discussing ways to improve data collection and analysis.