Portland lands $2.1M for cleantech initiative

The Portland region on Thursday won $2.1 million of the $37 million made available by the White House and multiple federal agencies through the Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge announced in May.

The city of Portland's Portland Development Commission, Worksystems Inc. and the Oregon Microenterprise Network will share the money and cooperate on what's being called the Portland Regional Clean Tech Advance Initiative.

The program will focus on job training and facilitating access to capital for startups developing promising clean technologies. It will also seek to connect the region's manufacturing capacity with its growing cleantech cluster.

"It's a complicated grant," said Sean Robbins, CEO of the economic development group Greater Portland Inc., which helped bring together more than 20 organizations from Oregon and southwest Washington to design the program. "It's focused on the commercialization of new cleantech technologies and how to move them from design to market. And, when we do that, on how to connect existing businesses with the supply chain and how we align the workforce to support it."

While 125 regions applied for the grants, the Portland region is one of only 20 selected by the federal government. EnterpriseSeattle received a similar sized grant for its Washington Interactive Media Accelerator Initiative.

Regions were selected based on their need for job creation and the capacity to collaborate and implement the program.

"Our unemployment rate is higher than anyone would like and the only way we're going to effectively change that is by working concert with each other," Robbins said.

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