Ray Perryman, founder and president of The Perryman Group, has been selected to receive the Chairman’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in Economic Development from the International Economic Development Council (IEDC).
The award is being given in recognition of Perryman’s decades-long commitment to economic development and providing the information corporations and communities need to optimize location decisions.
Perryman is a frequent contributor to the Fort Worth Business Press.
“I am extremely grateful to my friends Tracye McDaniel and Jeff Finkle and everyone at IEDC for this designation,” Perryman said in a news release.
“As with most things in my career, I became involved in economic development by answering the phone, but it quickly became a passion. Economic development helps families and communities achieve their destinies. It is a place where economics becomes very real and meaningful,” Perryman said.
“I was fortunate enough to come at it from a different perspective and bring some mathematics and optimization techniques to the process that make it more systematic and information driven.
“The real heroes of economic development, however, are the dedicated professionals who work tirelessly to make things happen and the citizens who vigorously support their communities. Being able to work with so many of them has been one of the most rewarding aspects of my career,” Perryman said.
The award will be presented at the IEDC’s annual conference in Indianapolis in October.
Perryman pioneered many of the techniques for economic development analysis now routinely used throughout the world.
He is author of “The Market for Prosperity,” a widely used primer on economic development that is used throughout the US, and “Texas, Our Texas,” the comprehensive plan that was the catalyst for the Texas economic development program, which is one of the world’s most successful, the news release said.
– FWBP Staff