When a medical device company with more than 300 employees moved from Arden Hills to a new building in New Brighton last year, Arden Hills Mayor Stan Harpstead didn't wring his hands or try to cajole the firm's executives into staying.

The company, he pointed out, had just moved across the freeway. The firm's employees hadn't gone anywhere. They were still living in Arden Hills -- and perhaps in places like Minneapolis and Stillwater, too.

"Cities have realized that they're not competing with each other because there's an artificial line running down the middle of the street," Harpstead said. "We are competing with India, and competing with China, and with southern California and Texas."

That global attitude is driving an unusual project by the Regional Council of Mayors to seize the initiative on job creation and business competitiveness in the Twin Cities area.

Thirty-four mayors, representing cities from Minneapolis and St. Paul to Edina, Apple Valley, Brooklyn Park and Roseville, are beginning a two-year project to analyze where the region's economic strengths and weaknesses lie, what challenges and opportunities key industries face and what can be done to capitalize on strengths or fix problems.

The emphasis on collaboration extends to a group of project partners that includes the Urban Land Institute, which acts as a coordinator for the council of mayors, the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and the state Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED), which is contributing $250,000 in state funding.

"They don't want to study, they don't want to train, they want action," said Burke Murphy, DEED's regional administrator for the metro area. "We want to get a handle on what is going on in the economy now so we can make investments and not just do triage ... build for the long term. And the mayors are going to lead."

Mayors are a natural for the project, Murphy said, because most of them are part-time politicians and full-time business people. That most mayors run without party affiliation should help keep politics out of the process, she said.

"It's a real selfless group. There's no turf battles," said Edina Mayor Jim Hovland. "We're more problem-solvers than politicians."

The new project grew out of previous work done by the council, which was founded in 2005. Mayors talked about affordable housing and transportation issues and the importance of job growth, and realized no one in the state is really responsible for focusing on that in the Twin Cities area, said Caren Dewar, executive director of the Urban Land Institute in Minnesota.

"That's how the regional competitiveness project was born," she said. "The mayors are like entrepreneurial professionals. There's real power in a group of mayors who want to work together and get things done."

Collaboration also is being pushed in Washington, where Murphy said it has become clear that the way to win federal grants is to cooperate across city and county borders.

The project will have its kickoff in October with a visit from Joe Cortright, an economic development specialist from Oregon who is an expert on "cluster analysis," the foundation of the competitiveness project. Key industries that are strong here, like the medical device or information technology fields, will be analyzed, with mayors going out in pairs to talk to executives about the challenges and opportunities facing each industry.

"The question is, what makes those clusters here competitive as opposed to those in other places, and what can be done to strengthen them here," said Lee Munnich, senior fellow with the Humphrey Institute.

The result should be a "blueprint for economic competitiveness," he said. The hope is that the work will result in concrete recommendations that can result in legislation or policy changes.

Hovland sees some urgency in the job. Many of the region's Fortune 500 companies were established generations ago, he said, and the local footprint of some of those legacy companies has ebbed as they've been bought and jobs moved away from the area.

"We've not been doing a good job on innovation, entrepreneurship and incubating new industry here," Hovland said. "How can we take our natural assets and supercharge our region and really make it move?"

Harpstead, who is president of a medical start-up called RST Implanted Cell Technology, said the goal is not only to find out how to nurture strong businesses that are already here but powerful ideas that might be just a notion swimming around in someone's head.

"What don't we know yet?" Harpstead asked. "We have to have a culture that cultivates that. Because you never know when the next Microsoft pops up. A lot will come out of a community that has a lot of creative and smart people."

Mary Jane Smetanka • 612-673-7380