For a decade regions funded the enablers — networks, missions, showcases. The next decade belongs to builders: strategy that becomes demand, companies that become commercial, jobs and capital that can be counted.
The last decade of innovation policy had a favourite noun: the enabler. The enabler convened. The enabler connected. The enabler ran the mission, the cohort, the showcase, the memorandum, the soft-landing brochure. Budgets followed the noun. Careers did too.
Some of it was useful. Most places were, in fact, disconnected. A founder in a university town could not find a customer. An investor could not find the founder. A mayor could not find either, except at the reception. Enabling, done honestly, is the work of making introductions that have a next step.
The trouble is that enabling became the product. Activity became the outcome. A region could spend three years becoming “known for” a sector and still be unable to name the companies that had hired, the capital that had landed, or the site that had been chosen because of the work. The slideware improved. The payroll did not.
That model is exhausted. Not morally. Arithmetically. Boards have learned to ask what happened after the delegation came home. Ministers have learned that a photograph with a prime is not a supplier. Founders have learned that a cohort certificate does not raise a round. The enabler still has a place. It is no longer the job.
A builder treats a frontier sector as an industrial problem. Space, defence, life sciences, AI, quantum — pick the one the place can actually stand up, or admit it is arriving from adjacent industry and say so. Then do the unfashionable things in order.
Map the ecosystem as an investor would, not as a communications team would. The output is not a diagram with arrows. It is a short list of firms, labs, gaps and the demand that would close them.
Generate that demand on purpose. The region and its companies in front of the buyers and investors who can move. Not a tour of everyone who will take a meeting.
Commercialise the native companies. This is the piece the enabler model outsourced to hope. A place does not become an ecosystem because it hosted other people’s scale-ups for a week. It becomes an ecosystem when its own firms can sell — and when inbound firms have a reason to stay that is not a hotel rate.
Convert. A customer, a round, a site. Jobs and capital, or it did not happen. Location is part of conversion, not a side hustle. Europe and the United States are different exercises. A builder knows which desk does which.
AI is the sector in which the enabler model looks most absurd. Every region is now an AI region in the same way that, in 1999, every region was a digital region. The headline is cheap. The capability is not. AI that matters for economic development lives inside something else: a defence firm, a hospital system, a factory, a space data stack. Enabling “the AI ecosystem” produces breakfasts. Building an AI position produces companies that other sectors cannot do without.
Quantum is the same lesson with fewer firms and more money. Life sciences has been learning it for twenty years and still forgets it whenever a new prefix is invented. Space and defence never had the luxury of forgetting for long. They just pretended the supply chain was someone else’s problem.
Enabling is popular because it is visible and hard to fail in public. You can always hold the event. Building is unpopular in the short run because it requires saying no: no to the sector you cannot win, no to the company that will not sell, no to the mission that exists to justify the last mission. Outcome-oriented work makes enemies. It also makes numbers.
Economic development organisations exist to safeguard a place against a transforming economy. That sentence used to mean holding on to the last industry for as long as possible. It now means entering the next one, or scaling the one already sitting in the industrial estate under another name. Both are builder’s jobs. Neither is delivered by a showcase.
From enabler to builder is not a rebrand. It is a change in what gets funded. Fund the sequence — strategy, demand, commercialisation, conversion — and measure it in skilled jobs and capital invested. Fund the theatre, and enjoy the decade you already had.
LibLeo is hired by economic development organisations to do the builder’s work in frontier sectors: the region, and the companies inside it. We do not sell cohorts, missions or showcases as the product.