Sara Lawrence

Sara Lawrence is the senior director for Solutions Optimization at RTI, where she works to intentionally integrate a growth focus, communities of practice, and innovation and digital strategies to unleash greater levels of creativity and entrepreneurship across the enterprise. She brings nearly 25 years of experience in economic development helping people and places develop strategies, analyze data, and assess promising practices. Her technical specialties include innovation ecosystems and industry diversification for broad-based development. She effectively interacts across all sectors—business, education, nonprofit, and government—to design and evaluate programs with action-specific solutions unique to the region of focus. Ms. Lawrence is adept at readily translating research into practice with a proven ability to relate to a wide mix of people, cultures, and context-specific issues as demonstrated by her experience working across the U.S. and in 12 countries spanning four continents. Ms. Lawrence is currently leading the U.S. Economic Development Administration’s Building Better Regions Community of Practice which provides technical assistance and facilitates network building for 60 regions across the U.S. working on regional industry cluster growth for transformational change. 

Ms. Lawrence has worked on a range of issues that intersect with regional economic development, including energy, community engagement, and commercialization. She has wide-ranging experience in innovation and technology-based economic development in urban and rural settings. Her work includes helping innovation hubs and research parks further advance innovation economies, assessing how cities and regions can leverage innovation assets to diversify their economic base and create economic opportunity, and analyzing opportunities for expansion in industry sectors such as manufacturing. 

Among other regional strategic planning efforts, Ms. Lawrence worked on a Blueprint for Building an Innovation Corridor in North Carolina where she analyzed a regional innovation economy, identified gaps and opportunities, and created a strategy for investment and action for broad-based development. She has also served as the Project Director for Innovation and Entrepreneurship-based Program Evaluations in Oregon, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kansas, Maryland, the Appalachian Region, and in Thailand. In this capacity, she established metrics and evaluation criteria to assess the success of government and foundation investments to promote economic development.

Ms. Lawrence’s accomplishments include co-authoring a book on Energy-based Economic Development (2014). She was recognized for a Women in Business Leadership award for Inspiration by the Triangle Business Journal in 2022.