When the markets of our region were convened, the economy's producers, suppliers and supporting institutions found that they often had much in common. For example, the Plastics cluster, the Paper and Printing cluster and the Automotives/Metal Fabrication cluster discovered they were not alone in their concerns about finding qualified workers, or in their views of how to take action. Other groups, too, found common ground in regional obstacles to expansion, despite their differences in operations.
The themes that our region's industry clusters discovered speak to a set of broader, collective regional challenges and desire for change. Since they are shared across many different industry groups, these common challenges are larger in scale than cluster-specific problems and require a unified and concerted effort throughout the region. Solutions will often require complex new development and change, and a longer time frame. These large crosscutting themes are priorities whose solutions involve many different "players" and "stakeholders," and we have therefore categorized them as "Flagships."
