Recovery Report

From the Desk of the Editor in Chief

When we compiled last year’s annual Rankings Report, the watchword was survival—inclusion in one of our top 10 lists was, among other attributes, confirmation that your community was not a major casualty of the Great Recession.

This year, we are pleased to inform you that the primary criteria for our rankings calculation is growth. We took great care to assess the growth potential of each location’s strategic initiatives. Our rankings don’t just tell you who has jumped off the canvas and rejoined the jobs-creation battle: these standings are leading indicators of which locations are ready to thrive in the New Economy. In fact, we created a new state category—Economic Growth Potential—which identifies the emerging powerhouses poised to dominate the hottest growth sectors.

We also reconfigured our green rankings this year to address the emergence of a burgeoning alternative energy manufacturing sector, turbocharged with federal stimulus dollars, and the beginning of a renewable energy power grid. We encourage you to check out who is leading the pack in wind, solar and bioenergy.

And since we’re fixated on growth, we’ve grown the 2010 Rankings Report into a double-issue combining our state, metro and international rankings into one handy package.

We congratulate all of the top-ranked locations and thank them for filling our pages with good news. Call it our “Recovery Report.”