Economic impact has a standard playbook: count jobs, measure spending, calculate activity, and produce a number. Oftentimes this approach defines how cities, institutions, and developers tell their economic story, but it can leave out the most important part—the context of the place and the tangible day-to-day impacts on the community.
Econsult Solutions, Inc. (ESI) has built its practice with a different framework. The most consequential economic value is not what an investment generates today, but what it catalyzes over time.
Founded in Philadelphia and headquartered in Center City, ESI is an economic consulting firm working at the intersection of economics, planning, and public policy. The firm advises governments, institutions, and the private sector on high-stakes economic decisions — from infrastructure investment and real estate development to fiscal strategy and policy evaluation.
ESI’s work is grounded in rigorous, data-driven analysis that holds up under scrutiny, whether in a city council chamber, a boardroom, or public hearing.
Philadelphia’s universities gave ESI an early and rich proving ground for that approach. The firm has worked with some of the region’s most prominent anchor institutions — among them the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, Temple University, Jefferson Health, and the Community College of Philadelphia. In each case, the standard economic impact story is important, but ESI has pushed further, helping institutions and city leaders understand the downstream economic effects of the research pipelines, the spinout companies, and the talent ecosystems that form when knowledge and capital concentrate in a place. Philadelphia’s history as a center for innovation has been driven by exactly that kind of catalytic economic development.
“Philadelphia’s universities have always been central to how this city grows,” said Gina Lavery, Executive Vice President and Principal at ESI. “What we’ve tried to do in our engagements is contextualize our analytical outcomes based on the broader economic dynamics of the place we’re evaluating, not just for universities, but across all the sectors we work in. The question we’re always asking is: what does this investment make possible next?”
That question has shaped ESI’s work far beyond higher education. The same analytical instinct to trace economic value through downstream and catalytic effects applies when the firm is evaluating a public transportation investment, advising on a major real estate development, or helping a city structure an economic development incentive to grow its economy.
While the firm grown in size and portfolio since its founding in 2013, it maintains a deliberate structure of hands-on principal engagement and a customized analytical approach for each clients. This approach results in analysis that is both technically rigorous and attuned to the political, fiscal, and community realities that shape how decisions are made.
As cities across the country wrestle with how to invest in their innovation economies and how to measure whether those investments are working, the ability to see past the standard playbook has become more even more valuable. ESI’s work, rooted in Philadelphia and tested across the country, is built for exactly that moment.
