My friend Ian has a hypothesis around innovation / economic success of a region that seems similar, which he has written up for our province of BC:
Basically, a region is successful if it has smart young people staying or moving there.
I think looking for indicators like this rather than far downstream stats like GDP is super important if we hope to experiment, learn, and improve things.
Goes well with gamifying everything, but in a way that acknowledges that there are active “loops” that underly much of society, and leaning into understanding the impacts of those loops.