Manufacturing: The next big thing in rural America

Submitted by acohill on Tue, 03/29/2011 - 10:59

Every economic developer in rural America should print out this article from Wired magazine. Read, highlight it, make paper copies, and distribute it to everyone they talk to, especially local elected leaders (who unfortunately, are probably not reading Wired in any form, paper or Web). Every region that thought they were going to win big on biotech ought to toss that old plan out in the trash and starting asking, "Do we have what we need to bring manufacturing back?"

It's not the big, old nineteen-sixties manufacturing that is coming back. It is the new, small, lean, technology-enabled start ups that are going to bring good paying manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. And they need a few things, with one of them being good, inexpensive broadband. Without it, they can't take orders, send out CAD drawings, upload CNC programs, provide customer support, and do everything else that broadband supports in the modern manufacturing business. Rural America has the best workers in the world, hands down. But without the infrastructure needed by these new companies, rural regions in the U.S. don't have a chance to play.