A better Economic Development of Culture Division to serve the city of Toronto.
The Problem
Structural barriers.
The Economic Development, Culture and Tourism Division of Toronto actively worked towards supporting the city’s creativity, liveability, and business opportunities.
Between 2007 and 2008, however, the division realized it had some structural issues that were preventing it from operating to its full potential. An alignment between resources, talent, and programmatic focus was missing, and therefore resulted in less employment and investment retention from within and outside of the city than they had sought out for.
Image sourced from national.ca
Finding and Defining Opportunity
A need for focus.
Economic development, culture, and tourism are a lot for a single division of the city to focus on.
It became apparent that narrowing this focus would be imperative to the division’s start in getting back on track. NetGain worked alongside Randall Partners to propose the need for separating tourism from the organization. This would allow for more attention to be placed on local and regional real estate, investment opportunities, growth, and retention.
Rising to Challenges
Difficult relationships.
The division worked with an external agency, TEDCO (Toronto Economic Development Corporation) to execute its projects at the time. However the relationship became strained as TEDCO was found to lack transparency, and its missions were no longer aligned with those of the city. It was especially challenging to realize the state of this relationship, because the organizations were so vast and complex; to come to any conclusions required several hundred interviews.
Image sourced from The Canadian Press/Lars Hagberg.
Results and Final Take Aways
Important distinctions for better function.
What resulted from this project was an internal restructuring where Tourism would now be considered its own entity, and TEDCO was replaced with two new agencies. These were Build Toronto and Invest Toronto, each distinct in their own function so that they could better focus on either real estate development needs, or city marketing and investment needs.
Throughout the process, clarity of purpose and alignment on goals were found to be especially critical to the success of the Economic Development and Culture Division.