David G. Brown, President & CEO, Greater Omaha Chamber
Building on progress. Accelerating toward prosperity.
As the Greater Omaha Chamber launches Prosper 2.0, we are focused on creating a bold, new future based on people, place and business growth. Through economic diversification, investment, and commitment to catalytic change, we can leverage our most powerful assets to encourage stronger population growth through talent attraction development and retention – all while advancing opportunities for business growth and community-building.
Where do we stand today?
The 2019 Barometer is our measuring stick, a chance for us to take a hard look at our progress and evaluate our region compared to others. To do this, we gauge our standing in eight key economic and performance-related areas: Growth, Human Capital, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Infrastructure, Cost of Doing Business, Quality of Life and Private Capital. We benchmark ourselves against nine selected cities that are either our peers, competitors or thriving centers of growth and innovation.
After comparing ourselves to these high-performing cities, the 2019 Barometer shows that Omaha performs well across several areas and often ranks in the middle. While Omaha has performed consistently well, it has advanced at a slower pace than our aspirational cities. Our strengths include abundant arts and cultural opportunities, high standard of living, entrepreneurship and low costs of doing business. We’re constantly evaluative and have identified room for growth in innovative capacity, infrastructure, aspects of human capital and in job growth.
Based on our progress so far, we know an ambitious and prosperous future is within our reach. Working together, and with your support, we can transform what “could be” into what “will be” and achieve our greatest potential as a region.
The Barometer
An economic scorecard of the Omaha region.