Frequently Asked Questions

Thrive works with local and regional partners to foster sustainable growth with an emphasis on quality of life outcomes. Our investors represent a public-private partnership. Our board, work teams, and partners are leaders across business, nonprofits, academia and government who work together collaboratively to grow the Madison Region and promote the region as a place where business and community thrive.

Eight counties: Columbia, Dane, Dodge, Green, Iowa, Jefferson, Rock and Sauk.

We are driven by our Strategic Plan, which includes five external driving strategies:
1. Grow target sectors: To accelerate the entrepreneurship, growth and development of targeted regional industry sectors.
2. Retain and expand key base sectors: To nurture the region’s existing key base industry sectors.
3. Enhance quality of life: To preserve and enhance the quality of life in the region.
4. Engage regional stakeholders: To build a regional and collaborative environment to achieve the mission.
5. Brand the region: To develop, market and communicate a brand for the region.

In addition, Thrive is guided by 10 principles, or commitments: competitiveness, equity, regional collaboration, stewardship, a sector approach, servant leadership, innovation, transparency, focus, and measurement.

Thrive takes a grow-your-own approach to economic development, targeting the sectors of agriculture, biotechnology, and healthcare, all of which possess characteristics favorable to enhancing the region’s quality of life. Thrive also works directly on quality of life issues, beginning with education and regional transportation. Collaboration, innovation, and servant leadership are key tenets of Thrive’s strategy.

• Target Sectors
Our areas of natural strength coupled with manmade resources dictate the region’s target sectors, and our sweet spot is their areas of convergence—the bio-agriculture and bio-medical industries. In addition, our region’s base sector strengths in financial services, insurance, government, light manufacturing and education provide a strong base of support for this work.

In a grow-your-own strategy, it’s important to listen to the needs of the sectors. In order to do this, Thrive surveyed the entities in each sector throughout the region. Those surveys were complemented by extensive one-on-one interviews with sector leaders. Results of the surveys and interviews were analyzed through S.W.O.T. analyses and through feedback from sector leader gatherings. The feedback was then filtered by importance to the sector, alignment with Thrive’s strengths and strategies, and the likelihood of Thrive making an impact without duplicating efforts.

At the end of this process, Thrive’s sector specialists developed and are implementing action plans containing initiatives and specific projects to address the stated needs of the sectors.


• Quality of Life
In addition to the quality of life integration in our sector work, Thrive’s initial quality of life initiatives focus on education and regional transportation. These issues were identified by nonprofit, business, education, and government leaders as topics that cross municipal boundaries, impact the entire region, and integrate with and affect the economy.


• Regional Assets, Metrics, and Collaboration
Since the region’s greatest opportunities are based on our natural and manmade assets, Thrive is conducting a Regional Assets and Opportunities Initiative for the 8-county region in partnership with regional leaders. This project connects with our Regional Metrics project to establish a baseline and track trends to measure our region’s economic and quality of life progress. In addition, we work with the Regional Economic Development Professionals Network of over 50 members to ensure collaboration on issues that contribute to our global competitiveness as a region.

1) Autonomous regional board with an autonomous budget

2) Affiliation with the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce to reduce costs and streamline the organization:

• Shared president and some staff


• Shared facilities


• Shared administration

Thrive exists to enhance, and not to replace, existing efforts. Our distinguishing characteristics that allow us to add value are:

• Thrive’s focus is on the 8-county region of Columbia, Dane, Dodge, Green, Iowa, Jefferson, Rock, and Sauk counties
• Thrive integrates economic development and quality of life, seeing them as inextricably linked
• Thrive focuses on three target sectors: agriculture, biotechnology, and healthcare
• Thrive’s work is a marathon, not a sprint
• Thrive enacts change through servant leadership and collaboration
• Thrive uses a grow-your-own model and therefore does not recruit companies

A high quality of life is what keeps and attracts talented people and what grows successful companies. Major quality of life issues, such as land-use, water, education, and transportation cross jurisdictional borders. There has been no lack of effort to address these issues, but there has been a lack of cohesion and cross-sector cooperation.

Thrive currently focuses on two major quality of life issues in the region - education and transportation - and is the catalyst for regional leaders to address them. In addition, Thrive is committed to the integration of quality of life in all of its work, and to specific quality of life outcomes as results of its sector-based work.

Our quality of life initiatives begin with education and transportation, with particular attention to how these areas impact workforce and business development. These are issues that often cross jurisdictional lines but impact the entire region—for example, over 1/3 of Columbia county’s workforce commutes to Dane County. Thrive works with its regional partners in these areas to build on best practices to bring together diverse working groups for better results.

No. Thrive represents and benefits the entire region. The Thrive Board and our working partnerships have the regional composition to prove it.

1) Forward Wisconsin has a state-wide focus. Thrive’s focus is on the eight-county Madison Region (Columbia, Dane, Dodge, Green, Iowa, Jefferson, Rock and Sauk).
2) Thrive uses a sector-based, grow-your-own strategy to grow the economy, focusing on specific sectors that enhance our regional assets and quality of life.
3) Thrive acts as a catalyst in creating, growing and retaining our own companies in those targeted industries.
4) Forward Wisconsin is heavily focused on the recruitment of companies. Thrive is not be a traditional business-recruitment organization. Any recruitment is highly targeted and based on sector-identified needs.
5) Thrive is proactive on quality of life issues as a catalyst to address key regional challenges and opportunities.
6) Thrive receives a majority of funding from the private sector, allowing it to focus on the job at hand and not on fundraising.

No. Thrive’s regional focus complements local efforts. Working with Chambers and other local organizations is a pivotal role that Thrive plays in order to be successful. An example of this is the Regional Economic Development Professionals Network, a group of 55 economic development leaders who work on collaborative opportunities to make our region more globally competitive.

-Approximately 10% of the total budget from the public sector using a tiered contribution structure based on equalized value
-Contributing is optional but requested for the region’s benefit

Having Thrive as a central economic development and quality of life catalyst for the region is a starting point.

Thrive connects businesses to the resources they need to grow in this region.

Collaboration between businesses, economic developers, Chambers of Commerce, governments, educational institutions and nonprofits are the process. Thrive is the catalyst.

Cooperation between communities is essential and Thrive is a driver for that cooperation.

We are already growing as a region. For example, 60,000 people were added to Dane County alone over the past decade (this means adding roughly the size of Appleton to the county population!).

The question is not “Will we grow?” but rather “How will we grow?” Thrive’s focus is to ensure that growth in the Madison Region is targeted growth that positively affects quality of life.

Thrive nurtures business sectors that are most compatible with the region’s resources, assets and quality of life.

The eight-county region of Southwest and Southcentral Wisconsin that Thrive represents, comprised of Columbia, Dane, Dodge, Green, Iowa, Jefferson, Rock and Sauk counties, has at its urban core Wisconsin's capital city, Madison.

National market research has shown that only 14% of CEOs and business people surveyed recognized or knew about the region, but those who did know about the region were able to place it geographically by its capital city. Madison is the "hook" by which audiences outside the region find us.

Use of our tagline, Madison Region Economic Development Enterprise, helps locate the region geographically with search engine functionality, as well as placing the organization in an industry 'bucket" for search functionality.

The State of the Madison region report is an annual report produced by Thrive detailing quantifiable measure across six categories. These measures give all of us in the Madison Region a realistic, measurable baseline against which to measure our progress, to gauge our opportunities for advancement, and to help regional leaders make decisions.

The Madison Region Assets and Opportunities Initiative, or A&O, is a first-ever comprehensive overview of the assets of the eight-county Madison Region. Where the State of the Madison Region is basically a snapshot of where we are, the A&O is a picture of where we could be.

Conducted with funding assistance from the Madison Community Foundation with research by Vandewalle & Associates, the A&O maps regional assets across multiple categories, from which multiple opportunities arose.