Entries by Bart Taylor

More on CompanyWeek’s most-read content from 2016

We’ll devote time and energy this fall doing what many of you do — assessing the popularity of our products (in our case, content), determining what’s working and what isn’t, and developing new content that do what most good products do: meet a demand in the marketplace or solve a problem. Here’s a list of […]

From startup to small batch: when a craft business becomes a manufacturer

How important is it that we continue to incubate small businesses so they become thriving companies? Michael Porter, co-chair of the Competitiveness Project and the Harvard Business School, declared on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “We’re stalled in America. Our performance, economic performance, on many metrics is worse than we’ve seen in many generations. I mean not […]

Manufacturing is losing the PR battle. Does it matter?

Despite the best efforts of candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, manufacturing continues to get killed in the business press. In Monday’s debate, Clinton even used a term endearing to government and policy wonks — “advanced manufacturing” — to promote its importance. But business media remains generally unimpressed. It’s more popular today for local and […]

Utah’s new MEP—the University of Utah—a promising resource for local manufacturers

The U.S. Department of Commerce channels resources to American manufacturing through NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and its Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) network. It sounds like layers of government bureaucracy, but the MEP network is actually a diverse public-private mix, collectively pursuing the objective of supporting U.S. manufacturing. Today every state in […]

Manufacturing’s change-makers

If foundries and fabricators are the heart and soul of manufacturing, today craft and lifestyle brands are its upstart rebels, tipping over convention and carving fresh tracks through and around an ecosystem never designed with its interests in mind. Just the opposite. Craft food and beverage manufacturers have labored against a bulwark of industrial competition […]

Competing to thrive: Utah workforce vs. Colorado high-velocity industry. Who has the edge?

In three years of profiling Colorado manufacturers and two years writing about Utah’s sector, it’s easy to understand why economic developers from each state view the other as primary competition. The attributes of each sector are strikingly similar. It’s hard, for example, to distinguish between aerospace and bioscience contract manufacturers fabricating for high-profile OEMs; between […]

‘Lies, damned lies and statistics’: Parsing manufacturing data an exercise Twain would appreciate

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Mark Twain’s frequently used quote was my first thought when reading the Conexus Indiana 2016 Manufacturing & Logistics Report Card for the United States. Covered in a recent column by CompanyWeek‘s Bart Taylor, the report gave Colorado manufacturing a D grade for overall manufacturing […]