They've got a home base, a game plan, even uniforms. The 17 members of Team Oregon who are in Japan this week hope to come home with one trophy – jobs.
Metro Council President Tom Hughes, Salem Mayor Anna Peterson and a host of other public and private sector representatives are touring Japan, meeting with counterparts, corporate officials and trade show attendees.
The impetus is the Fourth International Photovoltaic Power Generation Expo, March 2-4 in Tokyo. That's where Team Oregon will be in their powder blue Nike golf shirts with a sunburst logo on them.
"What we discovered almost immediately," Hughes said, "was that people would come to us and say 'You're with Oregon. We were looking for you guys by your booth.' We became almost instantly recognizable."
The game of recruitment in the solar cluster, Hughes and others have said, is networking. Coaxing potential investors to come to Oregon for site visits and discussions about the required level of investment can't be a passive act.
"It's critical to develop those relationships and introductions, in order for companies to learn about Oregon and want to come to Oregon," said Karen Wilde Goddin, the managing director of Business Oregon's Business Innovation and Trade Department. "Trade shows are a very instrumental tool we've used to recruit."
This will be Hughes' first trip representing the Portland region, and it's being paid for by Metro. His past sojourns, as mayor of Hillsboro, helped to land the supply-chain infrastructure that has helped SolarWorld flourish in the Tualatin Valley.
It also, Hughes said, helped the rest of the state.
"The advantage of having SolarWorld, and Sanyo down in Salem, is if we can build a supply chain here that SolarWorld and Sanyo need, when the next big company decides where they want to go, we have a leg up because we have the supply chain in place," he said.
Ferrotec, a solar crucible manufacturer in Fairview, and SoloPower, a new thin-film company in Wilsonville add to the growing mix.
Hughes started attending the solar trade shows early in his tenure as mayor. He said SolarWorld representatives gave him a list of 15 companies to recruit to the Portland region.
"Thirteen of those 15 names they gave us now have a presence in Oregon," he said.
Hughes also has meetings scheduled to talk about convention center operations and marketing, city development, solid waste management and a tour of Tokyo's Ueno Zoo.
Team Oregon, which also includes representatives from Hillsboro, Gresham, the Portland Development Commission and Portland General Electric, will also host two "Invest in Oregon" seminars, which Wilde Goddin said generally attract about 50 people each.
They'll also have a reception for some of the corporate bosses whose companies have invested in Oregon.
Not only is the symbolism of making the trip important, Hughes and others said. It also is an opportunity to bring back a message from the Oregon operation.
"One of the local managers in Hillsboro said, 'Could you convince them that SolarWorld is really coming to Hillsboro?' Because they don't believe me,'" Hughes said of a company that was set up to sell products to Intel, but needed to expand to sell comparable products to the solar manufacturer. "So my job was to talk to corporate management over in Japan and say 'This is reality. This is why they're coming. This is what it's going to be, and this is what they're planning on doing,' and they announced they were going to do a partial expansion on some of their facilities."
That won't be as much of the focus on this trip, although a March trip to Germany, along with mayors Sam Adams of Portland, Shane Bemis of Gresham and Jerry Willey of Hillsboro will include retention and expansion visits to SolarWorld and Daimler.
"That's really one of the first times we've ever tried to do this as a region," Hughes said. "We're going hand-in-hand to talk about how well we work together. That's a good message to send."