The Balance That Builds: Why the Mix of Technical and Social Capital Shapes a Region’s Future

Every region, whether a growing metro or a small town, faces the same underlying challenge: how to build an economy that not only grows, but endures without selling its soul.

Growth is often measured in jobs, cranes, and headlines. Endurance comes from something quieter, balance: the ability to expand without eroding the trust, identity, and sense of belonging that make a community worth living in.

At Summit, we’ve spent years watching what holds regions together when times change. The pattern is consistent. Economies thrive and survive when opportunity, innovation, and community remain in proportion. When any of these outpace the others, the system begins to wobble.

The Hidden Balance in Every Economy

Every community manages two kinds of capital.
Technical capital: skills, industries, and systems that produce tangible output.
Social capital: the relationships, institutions, and cultural glue that make collaboration possible.

Both are essential. Too much focus on technical growth, and a region risks becoming efficient but brittle. Too much emphasis on social structure, and it becomes caring but stagnant. The healthiest regions maintain both: the capacity to produce and the capacity to connect.

That balance can even be observed in the education mix. Regions where roughly two-thirds of college graduates hold technical or applied degrees (BS-type) and one-third hold social or human-centered degrees (BA-type) tend to show the most durable economic output. It’s not a formula, but it’s a signal; a reflection of equilibrium between productivity and cohesion.

Every region continuously moves somewhere on that curve between output and connection and the equilibrium never holds itself.

When the Balance Tilts

• Overbuilt on community services: The local economy feels secure but slow. Jobs center on education, government, or healthcare. Young professionals leave for faster-moving markets, taking innovation with them.

• Overbuilt on industry and tech: Prosperity surges but housing costs climb, inequality widens, and social strain follows. Innovation outpaces inclusion.

• Balanced regions, whether major metros like Raleigh, Denver, or Minneapolis, or smaller thriving centers such as Dayton, Huntsville, and Fort Collins, grow steadily while preserving their civic foundation.

The same dynamic shapes social health. When opportunity and cohesion drift apart, other pressures appear: crime, homelessness, disengagement, or distrust. Economic imbalance and social instability are two sides of the same coin.

Consider Lexington, Kentucky, home to a major university and the Toyota manufacturing complex in nearby Georgetown. On the surface, the region looks balanced: education and industry, side by side. But the underlying mix leans heavily toward education and services. Without Toyota’s industrial gravity, the region’s economy could easily stall, illustrating how a single anchor can mask structural imbalance. The lesson isn’t that Lexington has found equilibrium, it’s that even strong anchors can only hold the system steady for so long without broader diversification.

Resilience Without Losing Identity

Balance doesn’t mean changing who a region is. Every place has its own character and rhythm. The goal isn’t to trade identity for growth, it’s to align opportunity with identity so communities endure as industries evolve.

Smaller cities and towns often play an outsized role in that process. They supply the skilled workforce, the stability, and the livability that larger hubs depend on. When regional systems honor that interdependence, prosperity becomes sustainable rather than cyclical.

The Strength of the Surrounding Counties

Balance doesn’t happen only in city centers. It depends on the health of the smaller communities that surround them, the places where most people actually live and work. Counties like Nelson County, just outside Louisville, show how much influence a strong local base can have. When existing small businesses grow stronger, the regional economy becomes steadier. It’s far easier for economic developers to recruit new opportunity when their foundation isn’t shifting beneath them. That’s where Summit can help; strengthening what already exists so that future growth builds on solid ground.

When a region finds its balance between technical and social capital, the effects ripple outward. Communities become steadier, civic trust deepens, and leadership continuity becomes easier to sustain. When prosperity feels shared, so does confidence in the people and institutions who help make it possible.

The Mirror as a Metric

That mix of technical and social capital isn’t a dial leaders can simply turn, but it is a vital gauge to watch. It reflects how well local opportunity matches local talent. Like efficiency in a manufacturing line, it won’t improve by wishing it so, but if you understand what drives it and remove friction where systems bind, balance improves naturally.

The key is knowing which levers influence the outcome at any given time: industry mix, workforce retention, housing, education pathways, and civic engagement among them. By tracking those levers over time, leaders can see where equilibrium is drifting and make deliberate course corrections before imbalance takes hold.

A Broader Way to Think About Economic Development

Traditional development efforts tend to focus on transactions: landing employers, announcing projects, counting credentials. It’s understandable. Economic developers operate under intense political pressure to produce visible wins in short cycles. But lasting prosperity comes from the work that’s harder to measure: the patient tuning of systems that keep opportunity and inclusion in balance.

For local ED professionals, the greatest leverage often lies close to home. Strengthening the resilience of existing small businesses stabilizes the base from which every other initiative grows. Summit partners with local ED offices to help those businesses adapt, plan, and thrive, so their communities can pursue growth without rebuilding from scratch.

When leaders protect that balance, both the economy and the community become self-renewing. Growth continues, but not at the expense of belonging.

When that alignment holds, stability follows. Civic trust rises. Continuity in leadership becomes easier to sustain. When prosperity feels shared, so does confidence in the people who help shape it.

An Open Invitation

At Summit, we believe success doesn’t come from chasing numbers. It comes from understanding systems.
Our role isn’t to prescribe answers but to ask better questions:

What would it look like if our region intentionally cultivated balance between innovation and inclusion, growth and grace?

That question is where real collaboration begins between universities, employers, local school boards, local governments, and the people who call these places home.

Because a community that grows without losing itself is the kind that truly endures.