Sound Diplomacy and Invest Puerto Rico partner to accelerate economic development
Sound Diplomacy, has partnered with Invest Puerto Rico (InvestPR) to strengthen the island’s music, entertainment, and cultural footprint as a crucible of investment opportunities and economic transformation. The initiative dovetails with InvestPR’s role as the island’s economic development organisation focused on investment promotion across key sectors in Puerto Rico’s business ecosystem, including legacy industries such as bioscience, advanced manufacturing, aerospace, research and development, as we well as IT, fintech, energy, innovation and entrepreneurship, and others.
Kate Durio, CEO of The Americas for Sound Diplomacy noted that, “This partnership is a great opportunity to further understand the assets of the creative economy within the island to elevate and better position Puerto Rico’s value proposition regarding the music, entertainment, and cultural industries. We plan to gain a deep grasp of the value of music, entertainment, and cultural ecosystems - comprising music, live performance, theatre, dance, and film - identify growth areas, and produce an actionable strategy and implementation plan that delivers measurable economic and social benefits.”
To achieve this, Sound Diplomacy has created alliances with Inversión Cultural and 71 Associates, both of whom will bring local knowledge, and will help shape a strategy that resonates with the needs and demands of the cultural sector in Puerto Rico. The work ultimately seeks to empower the spectrum of stakeholders, including key actors in the public and private sectors as well as academia and nonprofits, to help enable and market the cultural ecosystem. Furthermore, the partners expect to produce an actionable strategy and implementation plan that delivers measurable economic and social benefits.
"Puerto Rico has long been an important international entertainment centre. The quality of our creative product is rooted in the quality of our entertainment and cultural professionals and supportive infrastructure, from the behind-the-scenes (tech personnel, engineers, designers, production) to the limelight (artists and performers). As such, it's important to better understand how to best foster and market this ecosystem to support sustainable economic development on the Island,” said Ella Woger-Nieves, Chief Executive Officer of InvestPR.
The work will take place across a 12-month period, seeking cross-sector discipline collaboration that will engage the wider community in developing actionable strategies. Sound Diplomacy will build an in-depth mapping of the cultural ecosystem in Puerto Rico; develop a regulatory assessment of the local context and a comparative analysis with other similar territories; apply a survey for the different actors in the cultural sector; and carry out roundtables and interviews with selected key stakeholders. Together, these completed elements will provide a comprehensive Economic Impact Assessment, as well as a strategy and action plan for Puerto Rico to implement in the following years.
If you are a part of Puerto Rico’s cultural and creative industries, either as an artist, a business owner or a fan, and you want to contribute in this joint effort to drive the cultural ecosystem forward, we invite you to answer this survey designed by Sound Diplomacy and InvestPR, and share your key insights with our team.
For more information about the project, visit www.sounddiplomacy.com and www.investpr.org.