When we started organizing the National Competitiveness Council’s regional competitiveness committees last year, our first intention was to get groups mobilized on the ground to get a measure of how competitive a city or municipality was. However, we never intended for each group—we have 15 across the country—to remain focused only on data collection. After organizing the committees, we saw their potential to take on other work to build up the capacity of their regions, provinces, cities, and municipalities. Because each committee was composed of representatives of the public and private sectors in its locality—often cochaired by government and business—we considered it a catalyst for change in its community. Read More