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BIC Leaders Boast of Opportunities at PERC Annual Meeting
By Andy McKeever, iBerkshires Staff
10:58AM / Tuesday, April 28, 2015
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William Mulholland, Rod Jane, Donald Rochelo, and Stephen Boyd served on a panel for PERC's annual meeting Tuesday morning at BCC.
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Businesses and educational institutions all need to be in the same boat to help make the Berkshire Innovation Center successful in reinvigorating the Berkshire economy, industry experts say.
 
At the annual Pittsfield Economic Revitalization Agency's annual meeting Tuesday, a panel representing the local manufacturing businesses and Berkshire Community College discussed the vision for a new economy based on advanced manufacturing and life sciences.
 
The Berkshire Innovation Center, which is to be built this summer via a $9.75 million state grant, is eyed to be the fulcrum of those efforts.
 
"All eyes are on this project," Rod Jane, BIC's interim executive director, said. "We need everybody to be in the boat on this. We can't afford to have anybody on the sidelines."
 
The center will provide businesses with access to advanced research and development equipment, customized job training programs, and a venue for collaboration with other companies all in a state-of-the-art facility, Jane said. It is hoped to not only help small and medium-sized businesses grow but also attract new companies to the area.
 
Donald Rochelo, chief operating officer of the injection molding company Apex Resource Technologies, said his company can't afford to purchase the new technology. But with the center, his employees will have access to them to help develop new products to stay with the changing industry.
 
"We're a relatively small company and I can't afford to buy these 3D technologies," Rochelo said. 
 
But it isn't just access to technologies that will help businesses, it is providing a place for the employees of different companies to work next to each other, share ideas, and grow new partnerships. Many startup businesses need partners to move to commercialization and others need to keep abreast with a changing industry, finding new avenues for sales, as well as new products. 
 
"The level of accelerated technology and innovation I could do is going to be instrumental in moving my business forward," Stephen Boyd, president of Boyd Technologies. "I think it is just raising the bar."
 
Rochelo said the center will quicken the pace for businesses looking at new avenues for growth. 
 
Boyd, Jane, and Rochelo are all on the BIC's board and say it isn't going to be a competitive place but rather a collaborative one to move local industry as a whole forward. And they say there needs to be even more buy in from all the businesses interested: The onus of making a success is going to be on businesses to use the center to its full capacity.
 
"The BIC is a venue to bring these parties together," Jane said.
 
The partnership includes higher education, with State University of New York's College of Nanoscience, Albany (N.Y.) Medical College, MassMEDIC, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Lowell, Berkshire Community College, McCann Technical School, Berkshire Community College, and Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts all on board.
 
Those institutions will help keep the younger generation in the county by giving them the skills and relationships with manufacturers to lead to jobs. 
 
"We're functioning like a team," William Mulholland, BCC's vice president for community education and workforce development. "One of our biggest challenges is keeping the 20 to 40-year-old people in this community."
 
Mulholland said the state doesn't have natural resources like oil to drive the economy — "all we have is brains."
 
Developing high levels of skills will not only provide the brain power for companies to find new revenues and products but also fill the gap in workforce, he said. Currently, many companies — including Boyd and Apex — have said it is difficult to find qualified workers.
 
Jane said business leaders often have recruiting lower in their priorities because running their companies is the top priority. The BIC, however, will be able to provide those internships and apprenticeships to connect skilled employees.
 
"The BIC, that's part of the mission," he said.
Mayor Daniel Bianchi provided opening remarks. 

1Berkshire economic development specialist David Curtis didn't sit on the panel Tuesday, but said, "the BIC changes our recruiting game significantly" when it comes to attracting new businesses.

He said some 80 percent of the economic growth will still come from within the area but he can now go to start ups coming out of incubator buildings in bigger cities and draw them to the Berkshires. The BIC provides an additional resources, coupled with costs of doing business, to bring a company here.

The panel's focus on advanced manufacturing and life sciences comes with supporting evidence. In 2013, PERC commissioned a study on the topic through the University of Massachusetts' Donahue Institute. 
 
That study did show a massive decrease in the number of employees in manufacturing over the last decade. However, it also showed that there were about the name number of businesses operating and the wages in manufacturing were stable. That showed that beyond the Sprague Electric and General Electric closures, a new type of manufacturing was still thriving in the county and has potential.
 
"Manufacturing is not dead," said PERC President Jay Anderson. 
 
The city has joined those efforts and is focused on bringing the manufacturing economy back. Mayor Daniel Bianchi, providing opening remarks, cited the new Taconic High School as helping to create the pipeline of qualified workers. 
 
"It is going to have very, very, strong 21st century vocational offerings," Bianchi said. "We are putting in place an educational dynamic that will serve Pittsfield and Berkshire County for years to come."
 
He also cited new partnerships with BCC, STEM programming for middle and elementary school students, and the BIC as creating a unified effort to those ends.
 
"I see the compass pointing in the same direction," Mulholland said of the various sectors focus. 
 
PERC, which hosted the breakfast, is doing its part. The organization provides an array of loan and grant programs to business. One helped Boyd Technologies a few years ago do a study on the skills gap, which led to a state grant to provide new job training programs. The organization also provides funding through the Mass Broadband Institute to bring high-speed Internet to businesses and administers some of the city's federal Community Development Block Grant funding.
 
Anderson said the organization has grown funding options to help more businesses in recent years and has taken a role with such things as the Donohue report to help grow the economy overall.
 
"We're really building a war chest of opportunities," Anderson said. 
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