WASHINGTON, Vancouver - 18 Innovation Partnership Zones

The Innovation Partnership Zone is a Washington State Department of Commerce designation. It was created to stimulate the growth of industry clusters within specific geographic areas. IPZs must have three types of institutions- a research university, an industry cluster and a workforce training provider- and the designation last for four years.  Currently, there are 18 IPZs across the state. The Vancouver IPZ is HERE. The two schools who are the partner hosts are University of Washington at Vancouver and Clark College.

This effort comes out of the Department of Commerce whose tag line is "innovation is our nature." For every one tech job that is created it is estimated another seven jobs are also created.