In late 2016, FC100’s Business Climate and Policy Committee established Project Sunrise to collaborate with key partners and stakeholders and provide recommendations to the governor and the Florida Legislature on policies that will promote economic competitiveness and improve Florida’s business climate.

The preamble to this project was simple:

We believe we stand at the doorway of a critical juncture when it makes sense for the Council of 100 to step forward and reassume leadership of the business community’s efforts to influence economic development policy for Florida.

As we set out with Project Sunrise, our efforts were guided by a few broad objectives. These included: 

• Develop effective strategies for economic competitiveness 

• Prioritize sectors and clusters to better diversify the economy

• Utilize efficient commuication tools to make the state more attractive for investment

• Develop better approaches to improve Florida’s business climate

• Improve the connection between workforce efforts and industry

• Provide useful outlooks and perspective and emerging trends in the Florida business community. 

Over the course of 18 months, FC100 held numerous workgroup meetings, performed a macroeconomic analysis of the state, produced an economic impact model, and conducted numerous surveys and interviews with business community and public policy leaders. Gathering that information helped us development six key strategies that we believe should be the primary focus for the incoming governor and Legislature:

1. Human capital – Make Florida the place where talent thrives

2. Strategic repositioning – Renew Florida’s image and reputation as the place to thrive

3. Economic development organizations (EDOs) – Create high-performance organizational capabilitites

4. Public investment – Grow the pie and maximize ROI

5. R&D and innovation – Make innovation thrive

6. Health -Make Florida the world’s health capital and the healthiest place to live in the world

To effectively achieve these goals, we produced 20 recommended policy changes and an outline of policy initiatives and programs that could be used to implement each policy.