Industrial cluster focus or growth-concentrated strategy?

Today, AEDC participated in a group discussion focused on the development of programs and strategies to attract talent to the Lehigh Valley, retain our existing and future entrepreneurs, and assist the startups that will bring us a diverse workforce. We covered a range of important topics, from job creation to networking, and we want to share some of our thoughts here. The whole discussion is worthy of multiple blog posts, so we will tackle these topics over the course of the next few weeks.


To this point, the focus of most of the entrepreneurial development in the Lehigh Valley has been in the South Bethlehem Keystone Innovation Zone (KIZ). Dovetailing the efforts of the State's Department of Community and Economic Development with the existing competencies and research priorities of Lehigh University, the KIZ invested in companies from a group of targeted clusters with great success. As entrepreneurial development initiatives expand beyond the shadow of Lehigh, the focus will shift. The group--which included entrepreneurs from the KIZ and from Allentown's Bridgeworks Enterprise Center--suggested spending time with growth entrepreneurs of all industries, rather than targeting particular industries.


You've read about these clusters here before: life sciences, financial services, healthcare, technology intensive manufacturing. Those clusters are industries in which the Lehigh Valley should have a competitive advantage over other national and global regions. Our region should be driving innovation in those fields and should have increased productivity as a result of the clustering. Most importantly to this discussion, the presence of those clusters should stimulate new firm development. Although not all of those clusters are central to the economic vitality of Allentown, we are not so sure that as a region we should back away from a focus on entrepreneurial development within those industries. We are competing with every other region in the country and the world for the talents of entrepreneurs. Every place would like to see more high-growth companies decide to locate within its borders. We need to be flexible in our efforts to stimulate firm creation by all entrepreneurs in the region, but we should not abandon the industrial clusters in which we have a competitive advantage.


The discussion will bear this out, but we think that the focus should remain on our industrial clusters, but that we should make sure that the efforts toward improvement can benefit entrepreneurs of all stripes. Infrastructure improvements and network improvements will help connect our future startups to the necessary resources that they need to launch.