Entries by Bart Taylor

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 […]

Utah gets a ‘C’ in manufacturing but flashes workforce advantages

In Colorado we’re ruminating over two reports released last month that rank the state’s manufacturing sector poorly. Tim Heaton, president of the Colorado Advanced Manufacturing Alliance, follows up on a column I wrote about the Conexus Indiana 2016 Manufacturing & Logistics Report Card for the Unites States that gave Colorado a ‘D’ in overall health […]

Coming to a neighborhood near you: collaborative manufacturing spaces

Last week, Curtis Williams outlined the conventional approach cities adopt to entice manufacturing businesses. It’s a combination of smart selling, the opportunistic use of incentives, and here, in Colorado, a large dose of leveraging natural attributes. Today Denver’s the fastest growing city in the nation. The rest of the state’s not far behind. It’s a […]