- Client
- Lethbridge County, Alberta
- Started
- Spring 2026
- Participants
- Senior officials from towns across the County
- Used for
- Business retention and expansion, regional partnerships, investment attraction, entrepreneurship
The challenge
Many resources, unclear connections
Southern Alberta has an active set of innovation resources, including the Regional Innovation Network of Southern Alberta (RINSA), a university and a polytechnic. For a rural municipality, the difficulty is seeing how those resources fit together with the towns and hamlets inside the County, and how rural residents and businesses reach services that are usually based in a city.
“Part of the work we were doing is trying to better understand the ecosystem that lives in and around Lethbridge County, find ways that we could map that, measure that, track that, and really have a deeper understanding of how it fits together.”
What they did
One diagnostic, several perspectives
The partnership began in spring 2026. As a first exercise, senior officials from towns across the County completed a common diagnostic on the regional innovation ecosystem.
Ecosystem Navigator uses structured expert elicitation: it asks people with direct knowledge of a place a consistent set of questions and records their reasoning. The questions are tailored to the institutions, organizations and economic conditions of the region rather than repeated from a generic questionnaire. Responses from different communities and roles are compared side by side, so disagreements stay visible instead of being averaged away.
What the diagnostic found
Areas identified for further investigation
Secondary opportunities from major industrial investment
The report asked whether major industrial investment in the region is creating enough secondary opportunities for local suppliers, entrepreneurs and emerging businesses. It named supplier matching and more intentional entrepreneurship pathways as possible areas of focus.
Connecting local businesses to major purchasers
One recommendation suggested exploring procurement matching or a "reverse pitch", in which large employers name products or specialized services they currently buy from outside the region.
Getting more local value from major investment
Several responses produced recommendations about knowledge and capability transfer from companies making major investments, including stronger connections with local suppliers and workforce development.
Research and industry connections
Joint research between post-secondary institutions and local agricultural processors received an average rating of 2.25 out of 5, the basis for a recommendation to connect regional research expertise with rural businesses.
Skills development closer to rural employers
Recommendations included mobile precision-agriculture training and workplace-based micro-credentials, so rural workers do not have to travel to a campus.
The findings reflect the views of the people who took part. They are not a representative public survey, and the recommendations are meant to start further conversations, not to serve as final decisions.
Why it mattered
Local knowledge, faster and at lower cost
$100,000
The 9-page diagnostic report was compared with a 100+ page Alberta government study of the region, which cost $100,000 to purchase. The findings closely aligned, and the diagnostic identified two gaps the study did not: angel investment and an agri-food accelerator.
“Typically, this would be a large consulting report. You’d pay tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach conclusions that this software can give me much faster… No one knows your market better than the people living and working and operating businesses in it… I think it’s the speed and the cost effectiveness, which really appealed to us.”
“The value for us isn’t having technology make decisions. It’s using technology to identify patterns, challenge assumptions and help us have better conversations with businesses, entrepreneurs, educational institutions and regional partners.”
What comes next
Measuring change over time
The County plans to use the work as one input into its economic development program, including business retention and expansion, regional partnerships, investment attraction and support for entrepreneurship. Because the diagnostic can be repeated with the same structure, it also gives the County a way to see whether conditions move after it acts.
“We can do a diagnostic now with a group of stakeholders, we can take action, we can follow the recommendations… And then a year from now, I can run that diagnostic again, and track changes over time.”
In the News
Global News, CTV News and Bridge City News covered the partnership and the September 2026 media briefing.
Global News
The Groundbreakers pairs AI with human expertise to strengthen regional economies
CTV News
The Ecosystem Navigator helps municipalities map and measure their innovation ecosystems
Bridge City News
The Groundbreakers turns local knowledge into practical economic development recommendations