Schinfeld Goes International

We’ve done our fair share of hellos and goodbyes over the years here at the Prosperity Blog. We acknowledged our former Director of Economic Development taking flight to Boeing and welcomed our new Director of Economic Development to the fold. We even said farewell to one of our team members in the last paragraph of a Weekly REDEW post.

But this sendoff post is the hardest because, well, it’s for me! After five long years at the Prosperity Partnership – and 383 posts (!) on the Prosperity Blog – I’m off to a new, um, “world of adventure.”

New Reasons for Onshoring

Deep in the hearts of local economic development people everywhere is the hope that maybe, just maybe, jobs that have been outsourced to other countries will come back. It’s called “onshoring,” the idea that local companies who opened factories in other parts of the world will say, “this isn’t working…I’m going back to the old way of doing things.” Or rather, “I’m going back to the old place where I used to do things: the U.S.!”

But one of the newest reasons for this trend has nothing to do with our labor costs or quality issues. Rather, it’s the fact that workers here don’t get shot at.

Weekly B-MOW: Fashion & Apparel Industry Cluster Tour

When we started doing the Prosperity Partnership “industry cluster tours” three years ago – every three months, getting 30-40 business, government and community leaders on a bus for a day-long exploration of a different industry in our region – I had a key organizing principle for how I selected our tour stops: the “I’ve Always Wanted to Go There” rule. It was under the assumption that everyone knew about our various assets in clusters like aerospace, IT and life sciences, but had never had the opportunity and/or the access to go see them. And so, we got behind the scenes tours of Boeing factories or Seattle BioMed’s “insectarium” or REI’s logistics center in Sumner.

But now that we’ve done tours of the major industries in our region, we’ve moved into a new rule of thumb: the “I Had No Idea This Was Here” principle. That was the case back in December when we did a day-long bus tour of the specialty foods industry (stopping at places like Green Mountain Coffee’s robotic coffee packaging facility). And it was absolutely the case last week when we did our latest industry cluster tour…on the stunningly significant fashion & apparel cluster in our region.

We’re All International Now

I have one add to Eric’s excellent post on the Greater Seattle Chamber’s Intercity Study Mission to the Silicon Valley.  The trip is the the Chamber’s domestic study mission, as compared to the international trip that the Trade Development Alliance organizes for the Chamber…which this year travels to the UK.

But the Chamber’s Intercity trip to Silicon Valley was anything but domestic in nature. In our technology neighbor to the south we found an engineering work force that was 50 percent foreign born led by CEOs a majority of whom were also born overseas. We saw electric car company business models that are targeted at international markets, a social media platform that connects hundreds of millions of people across the world and schools that are preparing students for a life lived in an ever connected globe.

The Silicon Valley would not be the Silicon Valley without large international customers, without foreign talent and without important partnerships abroad.  The same, of course, is true for Greater Seattle’s technology sectors. In today’s globalized world, even a domestic study mission is an international study mission

Weekly B-MOW: Ride the Bus for the Good of International Trade

Last week’s Best Meeting of the Week was hard to pick. For a short, four-day week, there were a wealth of options. But, proximity is the mother of inspiration (or something like that), so I’m going to go with Friday’s meeting. On Friday, I was at the Sea-Tac Airport Conference Center for the “Pacific Northwest Supply Chain Summit: Identifying Key Infrastructure and Logistics Issues and their Potential Solutions.” Put on jointly by the Ports of Seattle, Tacoma and Portland*, this was a forum for folks in the logistics and international trade industry (ports, manufacturers, railroads, trucking companies, expeditors, etc.) to share with the federal government their highest priority policy initiatives around supply chain infrastructure. In particular, the feds were interested in hearing about changes that would facilitate increased exports, in line with the National Export Initiative.

Now, a half day session on export promotion and supply chain infrastructure doesn’t have as much intrigue as season two of The Wire (which took place at a port, for the non-initiated). But I learned, or at least reinforced, some interesting things. And my number one take-away about export promotion through supply chain infrastructure investments? Sometimes investments in commute-trip reduction are just as good as new multi-modal infrastructure. Or to say it a different way, investments that get people out of their cars help facilitate international trade!

Sabermetric Trade

I’ve been a stranger in these here parts recently but only because my beat—international trade and logistics—is busier than ever. International activity waits for no great recession.  But, given all the talk of China and global currency wars recently, I can’t resist pointing out this speech by Pascal Lamy, Director General of the WTO. The gist of it is the trade statistics which policy makers use to make decisions are outdated.   Here’s a particularly relevant section:

Weekly B-MOW: Surveys and More Surveys

Giving the people what they want, it’s time for the second installment of our second feature: Best Meeting of the Week. It’s the chronicles of our adventures in the world of economic development, sharing the most interesting, exciting or unique things that the Prosperity crew is doing. This week’s B-MOW? Two meetings on surveys!

Ich bin ein manufacturer

Okay, I’ll admit that I took Spanish in high school, so that probably doesn’t make any sense. But you know what does seem to be making a lot of sense these days? Germany’s focus on manufacturing—and on manufacturing for export, in particular.

Let’s Talk Ag

When it comes to economic development, Prosperity Partnership has always recognized the importance of working not only regionally but also statewide.  That’s why we have WSU President Elson Floyd as one of our co-chairs, it’s why we run cross-state bus tours, and it’s why so many of the organizations we help launch – Aerospace Futures Alliance, Washington Clean Tech Alliance, etc. – are statewide. Of course, the most important reason is that we actually share a lot of industry clusters: clean tech, aerospace, IT, life sciences, trade, tourism and military all have big roles in both the central Puget Sound economy as well as the state’s. But there’s one thing we don’t mutually focus on: agriculture. Or do we?

I Want To Be Close To You

In the online, globalized world, geography doesn’t matter anymore, because we can email/conference call/GoToMeeting/virtual/3D/sync/nonsenseword/etc. Except that it totally does. For example, this new Innovation Center going right next to PNNL in Richland, WA. Why do they need to be right next to the Pacific Northwest National Lab? Is the IP coming out of there too heavy to move very far? Or is it, as others are arguing, that geography is a really important aspect to technology commercialization:

Daejeon Diary: Trees, Robots and Costco

Following up on Bill’s post about the Korea Study Mission, you can follow all the action of the trip here. The International Study Mission program has become the traveling university of the Greater Seattle area. For a region like ours which is so tied to the international economy, it is crucial our civic leadership understands the rest of the world.  In addition, we can learn from what others are doing to compete in the global economy and adapt those lessons to our region.

Selling Out International

Coming up tomorrow night is the second annual International Washington reception organized by the Trade Alliance and members of International Staff Group–which is a group of international organizations in our region who meet once a month to discuss issues of common interest, coordinate on activities and work on projects like the International Washington Reception.

This post isn’t a shameless plug for the reception because it’s sold out–we can’t fit another person into the place (no really, don’t call–we can’t get you in. Sorry!).   This fact and the incredible diversity of those attending,

Gotcha on the Gotchas

Nationally syndicated columnist Neal Peirce’s column which appears in the Seattle Times today should be taped on bulletin boards, forwarded in chain emails, become a cause of the week on Facebook and tweeted about throughout the land. He talks about the need for local officials to travel on business and study missions overseas.  Money paragraph:

Are we ready to retire the old bugaboo that any American mayor better think twice before visiting a foreign city — that the press back home will pillory him or her for “junketeering”?

But What Are We Exporting, and to Who?

I’m loving the ongoing blog back-and-forth about the President’s new National Export Initiative (NEI); it really is what this blog was intended to be: a place for folks from the Puget Sound to discuss and debate economic development issues. But I do think that the dialogue so far has missed out on one important topic: what are we exporting and to who?

Double Dare

Frank, in a comment on my previous post, Doubling Down on Exports, asks an excellent question: “is there any way to really achieve Obama’s goals of doubling exports other than a massive devaluation of the dollar?”  He anticipated my plan to address the currency issue in more detail in another post, mainly this one.

As I noted in my response to Frank, Obama has specifically mentioned the currency issue in relation to his plan to increase U.S. exports. Earlier this week Obama said, “one of the challenges that we’ve got to address internationally is currency rates and how they match up.”  Lots of people are complaining about China keeping the Yuan artificially low. But, we should remember that lots of countries over the last 30 years have been doing the same thing.  As if Toyota doesn’t have enough problems, they and