The EDC worked with the Mass Office of Business Development
to hone the value proposition for our region and Secretary Bialecki made a
cogent presentation to the consultants yesterday. Boston and New York are our
top target markets because we add the advantage of management proximity to our
core upside of a productive workforce at substantial cost savings compared to
those markets
Gov. Deval L. Patrick announced Thursday during a visit to Holyoke Community College more than $9 million in grants for life sciences-related capital projects in Western Massachusetts.
“Polymer is rapidly growing and committed to manufacturing in the United States,” said Jim Ryan, the company’s Chief Operating Officer. “Our new Palmer plant provides needed additional capacity, supports our commitment to innovation through the use of state-of-the-art technology, and allows us to run highly efficient operations. Further, Palmer is convenient to our customers and our workforce.”
Many of the businesses in our region are doing well. They have managed through the difficult years of the great recession by reducing costs, penetrating new markets and investing in new technology. This is true of many segments of our regional economy, but particularly so of our precision manufacturing sector. Despite volatility in their traditional sales channels of defense and aerospace, these businesses have remained competitive, largely through investments in technologically advanced machine tools and equipment.
Graney said the Economic Development Council’s research also finds that West Coast and international routes are needed at Bradley.
“All the other stuff helps, but the game changers are the West Coast and Europe,” Graney said. “To the extent that they can pursue and land airlines to make those flight connections, it opens up longer-range business prospects.”
I spent the previous two weeks in Europe on my annual business development mission to solicit inbound investment to western Massachusetts and/or partnerships with firms in our region. I spent three days in Düsseldorf attending Medica, the largest medical device trade show in the world (over 130,000 attendees), and four days in The Netherlands. I met with executives from 22 companies in the medical device, IT, defense, diagnostics, plastics, glass and sports medicine industries, and even a producer who wants to shoot a film in Massachusetts.
UMass Amherst polymer scientists Kenneth Carter and James Watkins, collaborating with team leader Francesco Fornasiero of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, recently received a five-year, $1.8 million grant to design ways to manufacture the new material as part of a $13 million project funded by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
Words like "crazy" and "milestone" were used to highlight the significance Friday of this city becoming official home to a $165 million high performance computing center. With iconic partners like Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, such a collaboration leading to the center's grand opening defied skeptics who might have dismissed such a project as crazy, MIT President Emeritus Susan Hockfield said.
In particular, the report singles out three relatively affordable regions in New England: the I-91 corridor, particularly in the Pioneer Valley area;
Sisters of Providence Health System, joined by its partners and local officials, launched a $20 million construction project at Mercy Medical Center on Monday to build a $20 million, state-of-the-art outpatient medical office center.
Springfield Business Improvement District Executive Director Donald A. Courtemanche said the vote gives the membership the ability to dramatically alter how the district works. Ideas he’ll present Nov. 7 will include spreading out the popular Stearns Square concert series with larger events, possibly in Court Square or Riverfront Park.
This will be a rare opportunity for executives in our region to speak to representatives of countries in Eastern and Western Europe, Canada, South America and Asia.
Alex Zaroulis, a spokeswoman for the state Executive Office of Administration and Finance, said the state recently hired a “municipal liaison for information technology” to assist communities in Western Massachusetts and outlying areas of the state with regional informational technology support. The outreach is in partnership with the Springfield project, she said. “We have been working to reach out to municipalities across the commonwealth to engage in any assistance we can offer,” Zaroulis said, of the recently launched effort.
The EDC is pleased to join Associated Industries ofMassachusetts (“AIM”) and the Massachusetts Office of Business Development (“MOBD”)in announcing our next “Buy Mass” event. This is our first out-of-state event.It will be hosted by Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford on August 9.
Arrivals and departures are estimated to increase 44 percent between 2009 and 2028. Economic development executives in Connecticut and Western Massachusetts universally agree that a robust Bradley is crucial to adding and keeping jobs in the region.
Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance or MassMutual came in at 457th on the Fortune 500 list.
Bialecki said he is planning a new initiative to woo companies from the metropolitan New York area, targeting financial services and information technology firms. He hopes some of those companies will consider relocating customer service jobs outsourced abroad so they are closer to home, particularly in the lower-cost Springfield area.
A successful example, he said, is a Liberty Mutual customer service call center located in downtown Springfield, announced in 2008.
Smith and Bialecki addressed 370 business people and government officials from both Connecticut and Massachusetts gathered at the Holiday Inn Springfield-Enfield. The Hartford-Springfield Economic Partnership is dedicated to marketing the entire six-county region called New England’s Knowledge Corridor as one single region.
A new $23 million, 125,000 square-foot maintenance hangar at Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. here will create the need for an additional 130 to 150 new local jobs.
Kumble Subbaswamy says he has a “comfort level” with that institution known as the state university flagship campus, and his résumé shows why: he’s spent most of his career in that environment.
Local, state and federal officials and various tenants gathered in the foyer, and praised the restoration of the downtown Springfield building. The property was purchased by MassDevelopment in 2009 for $2.5 million, and the agency invested approximately $3.6 million in renovations.
My new assignment as Senate Chair of the Joint Committee on Economic Development and Emerging Technologies brings home the daunting challenges facing our region but also offers great opportunities to overcome them.
Anzovin was one of the panelists Thursday at “Digital Games: Playing in the Valley”, an afternoon-long symposium at Hampshire College aimed at fostering the Pioneer Valley’s videogame and digital animation industry. The event was sponsored by Hampshire college, the Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council and MassDiGI, the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute.
Housing and Economic Development Secretary Gregory Bialecki said his office is facilitating relationships between western Massachusetts companies and large companies, like Raytheon, which specializes in military defense products. “We’re actually going to start by talking with some of our big companies that are here about, first of all, locating some of their business units out in Western Mass or other low costs parts of the state,” said Bialecki.