Date and Time: Tuesday December 9, 2025, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM (ET)
UEDA is hosting the Universities of Wisconsin for an informational webinar on their Sustained Growth Dashboard, a new add-on on their product, YourEconomy, that helps economic developers focus on the firms driving lasting regional growth and prosperity.
Join Gary Kunkle, PhD, and Gregg Cole as they discusses this tool that helps identify the companies shaping regional job growth. As sustained growth companies are the most important net job creators in our communities, representing just 1% of firms but generate about two-thirds of all net new jobs, they are most likely to keep expanding. The Dashboard highlights high-impact employers through interactive maps, location quotients, industry filters, and company contact lists, revealing where sustained growers are concentrated and how they influence your region’s economy. Attendees can discover how to use this tool to target outreach, strengthen partnerships, and turn data into smarter strategies for regional job growth.
To read more about sustained growth economies, click here.
Meet the Speakers
Gary Kunkle, Ph.D. spent the past 30 years immersed in the science and strategy of sustained company growth. His work blends deep, data-driven research with real-world experience advising hundreds of executive teams across a wide range of industries. Over his career, Dr. Kunkle has logged more than 10,000 hours of big-data analysis, led expansion initiatives in 39 countries, and worked with both small businesses and billion-dollar enterprises. While Senior Research Fellow at the Universities of Wisconsin, he helped create the YourEconomy.org dataset, the most comprehensive U.S. business databases available, which tracks over 42 million businesses across three decades. Dr. Kunkle has collected and analyzed thousands of CEO decision-making surveys, built predictive models to estimate the survival and growth odds of every US company, and authored sustained growth studies for states including: Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Michigan, Texas, and Louisiana. Today, he specializes in executive training and advisory services that help leaders implement the 50 most important growth decisions, identified through rigorous statistical testing of over 500 decision variables.
Gregg Cole is a research and technology innovator with YourEconomy at the Universities of Wisconsin – Office of Business and Entrepreneurship, designing and developing national initiatives to visualize and apply large establishment time series data. Gregg’s “apps” have become a leading resource for economic-development groups, policy makers and researchers around the country. He specializes in data and product/services innovation as well as data visualization and modeling. His areas of expertise also include large data assembly and verification, quantitative and qualitative research and entrepreneurship. One of his favorite aspects of his job is using innovation to discover new ideas and solutions.