A new index informs this year’s best in class in regional economic development.
In the site selection game, the only thing better than detailed data is more data. The more perspectives built into the matrix, the better the view.
That’s what you’ll find in this year’s new and improved Mac Conway Awards for Economic Development Excellence. Named for Site Selection Founder McKinley “Mac” Conway, the awards this year were determined by a robust index that is balanced one-third each across Conway Data/Site Selection corporate facility project, investment and jobs numbers across the country (cumulative and per capita) last year; the nationwide 2025 Milken Institute Best Performing Cities Index; and the nationwide 2025 Most Dynamic Cities report from Heartland Forward.
Common threads? As Heartland Forward’s Ross DeVol and Minoli Ratnatunga observed in their own report, many of the top-performing regions are home to top-performing research universities, from the University of Texas in Austin to Auburn University in Auburn-Opelika, Alabama. Some regions benefited from a strong year of corporate project activity or economic fundamentals like high-tech industry growth, wage growth and area GDP that the Milken study tracks. A number of regions are examining how to enlarge their collaboration range to encompass neighboring jurisdictions.
Here are the names of the chief regional economic development groups in alphabetical order by region, with data on each recipient’s recent projects, programs and initiatives.
