About Randall T. Kempner Randall Kempner is president of Prosperity Strategies. For the past fifteen years, Randall has been advising private and public sector leaders about innovation-based economic development. Over the past five years, Randall has served as Vice President for Regional Innovation at the U.S. Council on Competitiveness. In leading the Council's Regional Innovation Initiative, Kempner has directed economic development initiatives in nearly a dozen U.S. regions. He currently leads the Council's policy guidance and technical assistance team that is supporting the U.S. Department of Labor's Workforce Innovation in Regional Development (WIRED) initiative. Prior to founding Prosperity Strategies, Randall served as Vice President of OTF Group, an international consulting firm that advises regions and nations on how to create competitive advantage. While there, he served as the lead advisor to the Clusters of Innovation Initiative, the Council on Competitiveness's seminal regional economic development research project. In 2003, Randall served as chair of the City of Austin, Texas Economic Development Task Force that developed a public sector strategy to foster cultural vitality and the regional creative economy. Randall has an extensive international background, having led comprehensive competitiveness projects in Bermuda, Colombia, El Salvador, and Peru. He has worked in a wide variety of industry clusters including agro-industry, apparel, biotechnology and tourism. Kempner is a frequent speaker and trainer on competitiveness and regional innovation. Recently, he has been a featured speaker at Workforce Innovations 2008, the 2008 International Creative Cities, Regions, and Territories Symposium and the 2007 Competitiveness Institute Annual Global Conference. He is the primary author of the three most recent Council publications on regional innovation: Regional Innovation National Prosperity, Measuring Regional Innovation, and Illuminate: A Roadmap to Regional Asset Mapping and a chapter on talent in the recent Brookings Institution Press volume, Retooling for Growth: Building a 21st Century Economy in America's Older Industrial Areas. Randall has extensive experience as a facilitator and moderator and has participated as a lecturer in dozens of training sessions on economic development and competitiveness, teaching in both Spanish and English. Randall graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a M.B.A and an M.P.Aff. He earned his Bachelor's degree in Government from Harvard University. In 2004, he was a German Marshall Fund-American Memorial Marshall Fellow.