Found at: http://www.competitiveness.org/article/articleprint/868/-1/84/

Portland - an intensive and enriching week comes to an end

Another conference comes to its end and again it was a great opportunity to meet old friends, get new connection and learn from each other. As always there will be positive and negative feedback from the participants, but sure we will remember this as a special conference.

Amy Keiter

Where to start? We had very good feedback so far for the cluster tours, especially the Boing tour, the wine tour and some of the rural tours where quite popular - thanks to Tricia for pulling them together!

The Academic Summit was very successful this year - many good comments on the content and procedures! The presentations will be uploaded over the coming days, so also those who missed this part will be able to enjoy the new findings on sustainability! Sheila Martin was the overall responsible and did a great job.

The conference itself had many new insights and allowed several important steps forward - just mentioning the session "from aid to investment" or the session on "competitiveness in the islamic world". It was difficult to choose among breakouts like "userdriven innovation", "long term cluster development", "bridging the digital divide" and many others.

Or the rememorable panel with Mike Enright, Prof. Subira and Stuart Rosenfeld on the Future of Competitiveness.
Amy Keiter and Cheryl Vandermore made all these presentations and discussions possible!

During the presentation Paula Hansen made graphics of the sessions- they will soon also be posted on the website.

Randall Kempner

You can check out the blog of the conference, for some impressions on the conference with pictures, the presentations and the keynote speakers: http://blog.clusters2007.com/
And we will never forget the impressive Gala Dinner on Thursday evening where Amy and Tricia showed that they know how to arrange a party in Portland.

You will be able to download the presentations on the website in the Portland section, once you have logged in with your username and passwords. The presentations are available for TCI members only. If you have not received your password yet, please contact Lina Bunis: lbunis@competitiveness.org. If your membership has expired and you wish to see the presentation, please renew your membership online.

The Plenaries can be accessed here: Plenary Presentations at Portland Conference 2007
For the presentations in the breakouts, follow the link for the selected stream:
Innovation
Rural Clusters
Sustainability
Global Promise
Cluster Implementation

For more pictures go to innovation journalism at flickr.com .