MDB Insight Blog

Top Challenges & Best Resources for Economic Development Officers

Supporting Community Equity as an EDO

Ask Me Now – Measuring Service Satisfaction

Bike Lanes Are Not the Solution for Positive Bike Culture

Digital Infrastructure Attracts Digital Nomads to Your Community

Meet Chandra Halko

How to Improve Walkability for Economic Growth

Innovative Green Transportation Infrastructure in Canada

New Year’s Resolutions for Economic Developers

Why Your Community Needs Accessible Green Transit

Happy New Year!

Placemaking Examples: Festivals for Cultural Development

Merry Christmas!

Your 3 Favourite Economic Development Articles from 2019

Is a Bike-Sharing Program Right for My City?

Santa’s Magic Workforce

Do Your Citizens Want or Need CCTV?

The Best of 2019 Cultural Development

Coworking & the Evolution of Work

How Do We Make Public Transport More Efficient?

Here Are the Top Trends in Market Research from 2019

Today’s Dynamic Community Benefit Sector

A Wrap-Up of the Best of 2019 Workforce Development Innovations

A Big Win for Prescott-Russell

How to Use Public Opinion Polls to Build a Stronger Community

Robust BR+E to Promote Strong Community Growth

Stronger Together: Regional Workforce Development

Document Your Proven Track Record of Success

Creating a Sense of Place to Improve Economic Growth

More Interesting Reading

Three Ways to Foster Economic Growth in Rural Areas

Is Traffic Safety a Priority for Your Residents?

CIPs that Enable Economic Growth

Managing CAO Stressors in a Challenging Time

How to Support Local Businesses with Economic Development Resources

In Search of Urban/Rural Economic Prosperity

What You Need to Know About Understanding Tax Sensitivity

CCAB: Amplifying Indigenous Voices in Business

Meet Justin Dias

Rural Placemaking for Cultural Development and Economic Growth

How Much Does Market Research Cost Your Community?

Q&A with our Analysts

Proven Tools for Successful Business Retention & Expansion

Ideal Questionnaire Length (and what your coffee says about you)

Does Your Workforce Need Jobs in the Trades?

Highlight Skills for Mature Workers

Meet Evelyn Paul

Help Your Workforce Find Employment With Meaning

Flagstaff Used Tax Sensitivity Calculator™ To Inform Decisions

Interesting Reading

Creating a Skilled Workforce in Tioga County

How to Build More Trust and Service Satisfaction in Your Community

Go Big, or Go Home?

Do You Celebrate Tourism Week in Your Region?

Bellevue Gains an Edge with Its Creative Economy

Q&A with our Analysts

The Economic Impact of First Nations in Canada

An Innovative Workforce Strategy for Attraction and Retention

Statistical Validity (and coffee)

How Seasonal Businesses Can Expand Their Talent Pool

How Public Amenities Can Drive Citizen Satisfaction

Raj Chetty’s Opportunity Atlas

Will MDB Insight Be Seeing You at OEMC 2019?

The Countdown to EDAC 2019 Is On

Me and Bob Magee

Lehigh Valley is Winning the Battle Against Changing Workforce Trends

Identifying Economic Development Opportunities in Monroe County

Q&A WITH OUR ANALYSTS

The City of Tacoma Pinpoints Its Priorities

The Power of Public Spaces in Your Community

Industry 4.0

Connect with Us at the AMO Conference

Two Platforms to Help You Kickstart Economic Diversity in Your Region

Get a Holistic Understanding of Your Residents’ Service Satisfaction

Attract and Retain the Best Businesses for Economic Growth

Have You Discovered Workforce Central Canada?

Attracting and Retaining Talented Employees with BR+E

Get Alberta Labour Market Intelligence Specific to Your Economic Region

What Kind of Value Do Skateparks Bring to Your Community?

3 Ways to Embrace the Use of Technology in Market Research

2 Ways to Support Family-Owned Businesses in Your Community

What Does the Changing Workforce Mean for Workforce Development?

Two Ways to Make the Job of an Economic Development Officer Easier

Identify the Best Labour Market Intelligence Platform for Your Region

Two Questions to Ask When Hiring A Market Research Company

Getting Business Retention and Expansion Buy-In From Rural Council

Help Your Council Benefit From MDB Insight’s Targeted Market Research

What Does AI and Technology Mean for Your Workforce?

The Evolution of Measuring Citizen Satisfaction

Heard of the Eastern Ontario Manufacturing Workforce Development Plan?

How to Build Recession-Proof Businesses in Your Community

Is Public Opinion Crying Out for Lower Speed Limits?

How Automation and Jobs Are Changing the Workforce

How LMIC Gets the Most Out of a Labour Market Intelligence Tool

Ensure the Economic Growth of Your Community

Understand Public Opinion on Your Snow Removal Services

From Simple Measurement to Meaningful Data

Municipal Budget Best Practices During an Economic Slowdown

Developing Transferable Skills for the Alberta Labour Force

Overcoming the Challenges of Tourism Recruitment in Alberta

The Case For Walkability and Economic Growth

Continued Growth in the Alberta Agri-Food Industry

Are Your Residents Crying Out for Free Parking Zones?

Bolster Recruitment and Retention in Aerospace and Defence in Alberta

Waterfront Property Owners: Tap into Their Potential in Your Community

Will Your Next EDO Performance Assessment Include Compelling Data?

Tools to Improve Healthcare Workforce Development in Your Community

How Does Your Community Feel About Sustainable Development?

The Importance of Gender Parity in Economic Development

How to Support Age-Friendly Communities

Shifting How We Look at Higher Education

How Can You Protect Heritage Properties in Your Community?

Everything You Need to Know About Developing the Alberta Labour Force

Talking Tactics in Cultural Development with Jason Dias, Senior Consultant and MDB Insight’s Cultural Development Lead

Five Important Ways to Look at the Arts, Culture and Design as Drivers of Economic Growth

Cultural Development at MDB Insight – Innovative Approaches from an Expert Team

How to Collect the Most Accurate Canadian Workforce Data

Is Your Community Ready for a Free Transit Pilot Project?

Find Room for Environmental Responsibility in Your Municipal Budget

Can You Collect Superior Data from Free Job Sites?

What Are Your Best Labour Market Data Collection Options?

Collaboration Among Workforce Support Organizations Leads to Win-Win

Optimize Your Foreign and Regional Investment Attraction Strategy

How Long Should the Municipal Opinion Poll Process Take?

Can Alberta Communities Rely on Different Kinds of LMI for Data Collection?

3 Things an Economic Development Officer Can Do for Local Businesses

Congratulations – New Role for Greg Baeker

Does Your Community Want to Opt Out of Recreational Cannabis Outlets?

Find Jobs Online: How Many of Canada’s Jobs Are Posted Online?

How to Avoid Unnecessary Market Research About Municipal Services

The Importance of Labour Market Information for Alberta Communities

How to Drive Investment Through Talent Development Strategies

The Story LMI Tells About the Workforce in Your Alberta Community

Why Alberta Needs Labour Market Information

The Future of the Workforce

The Best Sources of Labour Market Information

Community Development: The Tools You Need

Why Cultural Development Is Important to Your Community

What Economic Development Initiatives Can Do for Your Community

How to Gather the Best Market Intelligence

How to Understand Your Municipal Market Research

How to Improve Your Municipal Services

How to Influence Your Community's Labour Market

Harnessing Public Opinion to Improve Municipal Services

How to Build a Workforce Development Strategy for Your Community

Use the Off Season to Improve Cultural Development Infrastructure

Manage Residents’ Tax Sensitivity Objections With Real-Time Data

BR&E: Attract Investors Before They Even Know They’re Looking for You

What Is Social Media's Role in Citizen Satisfaction?

How an Economic Development Tool Can Help You Create Sustainable Tourism in Your Community

The Value In Putting the Right Public Opinion Polling Tool to Work

Are You Tapping Into the Right Labour Market?

Know What Residents Want: Should the Municipal Budget Be Used For Bike Lanes?

Should Social Media Be a Part of Your Talent Strategy?

How Public Opinion Polling Demonstrates the Impact of Your Work

How to Ensure Your Polling Doesn’t Decrease Citizen Satisfaction

The Workforce Development Tool to Keep Your Community Competitive

Public Polling: Real Issues vs. Issues That Are Real to a Few

Can You Use Labour Force Data for Strategic Growth?

How Residents’ Tax Sensitivity Helps You Find Money in Your Budget

Where Is All the Good Labour Market Information?

How to Use Inbound Marketing for Economic Development Websites

Implement Cultural Mapping to Enhance Tourism in Your Community

Can You Encourage Young People to Live and Work in Your Rural Community?

How to Focus Your Municipal Budget on Green Solutions for your Community

Opinion Polling: Do It Early and Often Post-Election

MDB Insight’s Legacy at EDANL

Optimize Labour Market Intelligence with Real-Time Data

How Labour Market Intelligence and Cultural Vibrancy Attracts Site Selectors to Your Region

Attracting and Retaining a Millennial Workforce

Are You Hearing from Everyone in Your Citizen Satisfaction Survey?

Reach Municipal Objectives With Well-Crafted Key Performance Indicators

Prove the Worth of Rural Economic Development

Find Practical Solutions to Your Municipal Budget Problems

How Do You Know the Labour Market Data You Collected Is Meaningful?

How to Use Survey Results to Bring Elected Officials Up To Speed Fast

Do Your Budget Realities Meet Citizen Satisfaction Expectations?

Rural Economic Development: When Multiple Projects Are Understaffed

Get Market Research for Projects Without Using Your Own Staff

What Makes Some Labour Force Data Better Than Others?

Does Public Polling Give You What You Need to Improve Your Community?

Creative Placemaking: How to Promote Your Community’s “Sense of Place”

Provide True Citizen Satisfaction, No Matter the Size of Your Tax Base

What’s Wrong With Your Economic Development Tools?

Preparing for Labour Market Demand and Supply in 2025

Cultural Planning – what can we learn from the early adopters?

MDB Insight is Hiring!

Cultural Economies – What are they and how do we build them?

Award of Excellence for Moncton Cultural Plan!

MDB Insight is Hiring!

MDB Insight is Hiring!

Is more growth always better?

The MDB Insight team is evolving

TINAN 78 (June 2017)

Meet our new Market Research and Analytics Division

Is your city playable?

The changing face of community engagement

Resource Review: Pollinating local economies

Empowering women could help close income gaps

How climate change could hamper global productivity

The first ever global map of cultural and creative industries

Will your job be automated?

Ready to Give the Presentation of Your Life? "ED TALKS” Nominations Are Now Open

Changing binary views of suburbia

Is income inequality making us unhappy?

How does Canada's job quality rank?

Resource Review: 12 Strategies for Re-Energizing Your Community

Which is a better investment for your community: Startups or large companies?

A look at the workforce of 2020

Is your community leveraging equigenic environments?

A fresh look at creativity, clusters, and competitiveness

How old will you be when the global gender gap closes?

Are Canada's workers facing a capital crisis?

Water scarcity could dry up economic opportunities

How happy is the world in 2016?

Haves and have-mores in the digital economy

TINAN 77

Millennials can’t afford to job hop

Want more entrepreneurs?

Resource Review: Healthcare Disrupted

A look at the first Census 2016 Release

How do great cities actually work?

Ontario Workforce Update 2016

Connecting the urban-curious

Does city living make people happier?

Gentrification: Improvement or displacement?

Innovative solutions to retool cities

Why are American men leaving the workforce?

Creating opportunity for all

Mapping US tech start-up investment

The rise of the gig economy

The 2016 Christmas Price Index is out

Resource Review - Connectography: Just how interconnected are we?

Are you ready for the Census 2016 data releases?

TINAN 75

TINAN 74

The OECD's painfully slow job recovery

How Toronto is getting main street businesses online

How do businesses learn?

TINAN 73

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Performance measurement workshops

What's the value of creative work?

The cost of the Twelve Days of Christmas

TINAN 67

TINAN 66

SMEs show their worth – Again

Sally Krawchek’s nine steps to a better personal brand

Create win-win-win results with employer engagement

TINAN 65

Millier Dickinson Blais rebrands as MDB Insight

Introducing MDB Insight

TINAN 64

TINAN 63

Lessons from Year Two: Economic development is a contact sport

Year 1 in Edmonton: Competition, camaraderie and community

TINAN 62

Hello economic development community - Reflections on EDAC Year 1

EDCO and MDB Formalize Partnership

Canada’s Job Demand Stable Despite Oil and Gas Industry Woes

TINAN 61

Drivers in cultural planning today – Part 2

The changing shape of modern cities

Can productivity save global economic growth?

MDB welcomes a new Partner!

Drivers in cultural planning today – Part 1

Insights from Cannexus and a question

TINAN 59

Creating a Food Truck Friendly Community

TINAN 58

Planning culture or planning culturally?

Two takeaways from the 2014 EDAC Conference

We're off to the 2014 EDAC Conference

TINAN Number 57

The Arts and Culture as Economic Drivers: Ideas and US Best Practices

TINAN 56

A Toronto-Edinburgh Exchange on Culture and Economic Development

Canada's skills gap - Fact or fiction? Depends on who you ask

Getting down to the nitty-gritty on local labour market data

TINAN 55

Arts Organizations Attract Many Diverse Canadians

Screw Business as Usual

TINAN 54

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Fourth pillar of sustainability

TINAN 52

Shaping the Framework for an Ontario Labour Force Strategy

Creative Vitality in Detroit: The Detroit Cultural Asset Mapping Project

How's life in 2013?

A Cultural Turn in Planning

The WEF ranks countries on human capital development

How much would the 12 days of Christmas set you back this year?

Creative Economy Report 2013: Widening Local Development Pathways

Colin Mercer (1952-2013): In Memoriam

Why I’m learning to code

Are the creative industries as innovative as we think?

Making the most of rural-urban partnerships

Turning vacancies into communities

Leveraging employee engagement in economic and workforce development

Building the foundation for digital fabrication: A real-world example

Making Makers: Transforming skills development, igniting creativity, and building our future

Digital fabrication & additive manufacturing 101

Cultural Mapping Book Review

Makers

The Great Degeneration

Lean In

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MDB Insight and Vicinity Jobs launch Jobs Demand Report

Dr. Greg Baeker appointed to professional advisory board for Ryerson University’s new School of Creative Industries

TINAN Number 47

Planning with Intention? It’s time for new dialogue…

Court Ellingson Named to the Economic Developers Alberta (EDA) 2013 Board of Directors

Time for Outrage

Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth

Vacant land inventory: Are basic tools being overlooked?

TINAN Number 46

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Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosysytem in your City

Canada's Workforce Crisis: Moving from Conversation to Action

The Iceberg Dilemma

TINAN Number 43

Is Canada's economy in hot water

TINAN Number 42

Gift Giving

TINAN Number 41

From red flags to green (Part 2): How to see into the invisible economy

Art is to Culture as Baseball is to Sport: the ‘Arts Plus Swindle’

Collaboration

Focusing on what matters

The Cultural Economy and its Global Reach

Assessing Impacts in Creative Placemaking

Are you Going to Map That? Application of GIS in Economic Development

Where are the Answers?

The Future of the Canadian Dairy Industry’s Supply Chain Management is up for Discussion

IEDC: Is it time to take the conference digital?

Attracting Professor Smith: The Key to Community Prosperity…

Detroit’s "dead" proposal

From red flags to green (Part 1): BR+E in the emerging economy

Enabling rural economic development in Ontario

Canada Needs a National Workforce Strategy

Creative Placemaking

New Online Resource For Economic Development Unveiled

The End of Cool?

Economic development in rural communities needs more investment from both the federal government and private sector

Getting fat in the post-industrial society

How will Baxter change manufacturing?

The Fall Fair as an Entrepreneurial Meetup

Filthy hybrids and electrics

How do you cool a desert city that uses no carbon emissions?

TINAN Number 40

Winning the coming jobs war

TINAN Number 39

13 ways to kill your community

TINAN Number 38

The New Geography of Jobs

TINAN Number 37

Is this the end of growth?

Think fast...or slow

Supporting economic development in Ukraine

TINAN Number 36

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On the hunt: Ideas for the intuitive

TINAN Number 34

Steve Jobs

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What’s the Economy For, Anyway?

TINAN Number 32

Think Better

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The Leap: How to Survive and Thrive in the Sustainable Economy

TINAN Number 30

Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next

Lending a Helping Hand in Janvier

TINAN Number 29

Evolution of great world cities: Urban wealth and economic growth

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Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

TINAN Number 27

Is Economic Development Too Trendy?

Hot, Flat, and Crowded

TINAN Number 26

This American Life

The Enemies of Excellence

The Importance of Small Business to Our Economy

TINAN Number 25

Reality is Broken – Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

TINAN Number 24

Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives -- How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do

What's the "C" in CED?

Downtown revitalization in action

TINAN Number 23

Rediscovering the Wealth of Places

The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage

Ontario East Interview

Google shakes up the travel industry

TINAN Number 22

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children

Young Professionals Network Launch Event

TINAN Number 21

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World

No Jobs, No Problem for Youth Entrepreneurs

TINAN Number 20

Housing Gen Y: Experience, not expanse

EconoMyths: Ten ways economics gets it wrong

TINAN Number 19

UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging

Revitalizing the Rust Belt

Rethinking Service Work

TINAN Number 18

Annual National Salary Survey

GrowthCamp

TINAN Number 17

What’s so Hot about the Profit Hot 50?

MDB Insight Earns Spot On The Prestigious Profit Hot 50 List

What Women Want: The Global Market Turns Female Friendly

Dickinson named Co-Director of University of Waterloo's Economic Development Program

TINAN Number 16

Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

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Rediscovering the Wealth of Places

TINAN Number 14

The Great Reset

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Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

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Create Your Own Economy

County of Elgin, Ontario, Wins EDCO Marketing Award

TINAN Number 11

Six Pixels of Separation

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The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture

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PR 2.0

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SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

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Communities in Boom: Canada’s Top Entrepreneurial Cities

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2009 Annual National Salary Survey

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The Green Collar Economy

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Getting started guide: Climate prosperity strategies in your community

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Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization

TINAN Number 2

A Brief History of the Future

TINAN Number 1

The Age Curve: How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Storm

MDB Insight Expands Community and Client Service Initiatives