Virginia Economic Review

When Dutch secondary packaging solutions provider BluePrint Automation decided to open a U.S. location in 1987, the company chose a site in Chesterfield County near Richmond, due in part to the regional talent market and multiple nearby ports that could facilitate importing.

When Ryan Buzzy was a child, his passion was to take radios apart to see how they worked. At 25, he’s not a kid anymore, but his passion for seeing how things work never changed.

Foreign companies looking to invest in Virginia go through the same considerations as their domestic counterparts — site evaluation and selection, workforce availability, and logistical issues, to name a few.

Steven Brint is a distinguished professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of “Two Cheers for Higher Education.”

Several Virginia higher education institutions now offer courses to help students and working professionals learn how to use data to inform decision-making and solve problems — and some are helping to shape research that could ultimately impact medical, financial, and numerous other fields.

Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism.