Cascadia leaders to 'swing for the fences' on problems facing region, world
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Wed, 02 Oct 2019 00:50:21 +0000
When political and business leaders from B.C., Washington state and Oregon gather this week in Seattle, their agenda will include some lofty subjects, everything from revolutionizing how global trade is conducted to curing cancer.
The Pacific Northwest is “an ecosystem that now, up-and-down the coast, has some of the world’s biggest companies, some of the world’s most progressive approaches to policy, and has been the birthplace of both environmental activism and social-policy activism that the rest of the world now takes for granted,” said Greg D’Avignon, CEO of the Business Council of B.C.
“Those things were all happening because of the entrepreneurial spirit and, frankly, the innovation and leadership capacity the people of the Pacific Northwest hold,” D’Avignon said. “So why wouldn’t we be the place that goes and swings for the fences for those other next-generation opportunities?”
This week, the business council helps present the fourth annual Cascadia Innovation Corridor Conference in Seattle, an event aiming to elevate the global economic position of the Cascadia Region, which includes Vancouver, Seattle and Portland. The conference will bring together the mayors of Vancouver and Seattle, B.C. Premier John Horgan with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, CEOs of large companies and federal politicians from Oregon, Washington state and B.C.
The conference was born four years ago after the business council came together with Challenge Seattle, an alliance of CEOs from some of Washington state’s largest companies, including Amazon and Microsoft.
“What we found is that while we’ve got lots in common, we didn’t have a lot of business connections,” D’Avignon said. “We were three solitudes not really connecting and working together.”
With the conference, which took place last year in Vancouver, the business council and Challenge Seattle aim to promote cross-border innovation in sectors including forestry, agriculture, health and financial technology.
At this week’s event, D’Avignon said, “we’re going to hear big, moon-shot ideas, what we can do to really shape not only our own future, but the future of the world.”
“I think we’ve got a huge opportunity — and this sounds very bold — to actually create a pathway to cure cancer,” he said.
Health institutions in Vancouver, Seattle and Portland already have a strong track record, D’Avignon said, of “making global change to clinical outcomes of cancer” over the last decade. Next, D’Avignon believes the region could soon play an important role in “effectively turning it into a chronic disease … the same way we talk about other chronic-disease types like asthma.”
Other subjects on the agenda this week will include the prospect of a high-speed rail link that could connect Vancouver, Seattle and Portland, cutting travel time between each city to under an hour. In July, after Washington state released a business case for the proposed rail connection, Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart told Postmedia News that he was excited about the prospect, and looked forward to discussing it with U.S. officials at the conference.
The Cascadia Innovation Conference takes place Oct. 2-3.