Oregon Business Plan Summit: As provincial and insular as last year

It’s time again for the annual gathering called the Oregon Leadership Summit. I find it depressing. I complained last year that the “Oregon Business Plan lacks international dimensions” (here):

President Obama, in calling for a doubling of US exports over the next four years, recently said “This is where America’s jobs will be tomorrow.  Ninety five percent of the world’s customers and fastest growing markets are beyond our borders.” Obama’s view is not reflected in the Oregon Business Plan’s initiatives.  

Let me suggest that innovative products produced by traded-sector clusters, the Oregon Business Plan's economic growth model, are not just going to sell themselves to the rest of the world. It will take advertising and sales people skilled and knowledgeable of foreign markets. Beyond that, Oregon is unlikely even to develop innovative products for foreign markets unless its workforce becomes much more sophisticated about those markets.

None of my perspective took hold. This year’s document remains as provincial and insular as last year's document. In fact, as a Oregonian editorial explains, there are no new proposals. The Summit i s doubling down on lasts year's inadequate proposals (here):

When hundreds of the state's top business and government leaders gather today and Tuesday in Portland for the annual Oregon Leadership Summit, there is an unusual consensus about the state's many economic and public-service challenges, and what should be done about them. For the first time in the nine-year history of the event, there's no new business agenda. Instead, there's a three-word theme on the front of a 30-page document that is more or less identical to last year's publication: "Time to Deliver."

I did attend an opening breakfast session on the one and only agenda item that hinted at so me international dimensions. It was titled “South Coast – Developing the Bay of Coos for International Commerce.” The photos are from that breakfast. However, few international issues or dimensions were discussed. There was no mention of the growing markets in Asia, much less specific discussions of the opportunities in each. The emphasis was on changes needed here, such a “permiting” for some desire project.

Not having an international frame of mind, nor much interest in the specifics of the international markets around the Pacirfic rim, will surely limit economic development in the South Coast. To break out of it, they could send some of their high school students to study countries all around the Pacific rim.

Comments

[business letters]

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