Prosperity Partnership's Southwest Tour Taking Shape Early Registration Pricing Through May 12 From Wednesday, June 18 through Friday, June 20, the Prosperity Partnership will visit Southwest Washington to learn about issues key to Washington state's continued growth, such as power, transportation, higher education, supplier diversity, workforce training and others. The tour will explore business development in Vancouver and the potential for collaboration with the rest of the state. This might include joint advocacy in Olympia, or specific economic development and job creation projects. SW Washington leaders and businesses are working to strengthen the state in a number of industries and foundation areas important to both Puget Sound and Spokane. Nanophotonics, Clean Technology, Life Sciences all play important roles in the economies of SW Washington, as do Arts and Culture and Higher Education. Tour participants will learn what is being done in these clusters and explore ways to collaborate. Registration materials are online at prosperitypartnership.org. For more information, contact Chris Strow, Principal Economic Policy Analyst at 206-971-3051 or cstrow@psrc.org. back to top Prosperity Partnership Establishing International Benchmarks Consortium with Global Peer Regions Increasingly, worldwide competition is focused neither on countries nor on individual cities, but on large metropolitan regions that function as individual economic units. The Prosperity Partnership recognizes that the globalization of the world's economy requires regions and their leadership to understand how they are performing compared to similar areas worldwide, and is working to connect with central Puget Sound's international peer regions on benchmarks to determine how the region is performing on key indicators.
Through the Puget Sound Regional Council, the Prosperity Partnership is coordinating with the Technology Alliance and Trade Development Alliance of Greater Seattle to develop an International Regions Benchmarking Consortium, a network of sophisticated city-centered metropolitan areas. Member regions of the Consortium are set to meet for the first time in Seattle this June to develop international connections, share best practices and discuss the benchmarking effort.	Members of the Consortium: Barcelona, Spain Daejeon, South Korea Dublin, Ireland Fukuoka, Japan Helsinki, Finland Melbourne, Australia Munich, Germany Seattle, USA Stockholm, Sweden
The goals of the Consortium are two-fold: Develop a shared set of economic and social indicators for each participating region that show evidence of best practices in certain areas. This resource will be used for self-evaluation of economy, society, environment, infrastructure, and other relevant urban issues using other regions around the world as a benchmark. Build a learning community that shares these best practices in a way that makes participant regions more competitive in the global economy. This international collaboration is unique for its emphasis on shared learning. This effort moves beyond old models of ranking and competition, and instead focuses on common challenges, complementary strengths, and innovative collaborations. For more information contact Joan Chen at 206-389-2889, jchen@psrc.org, or visit www.internationalregions.org. back to top