Driving Investment, Innovation, and Industry Synergy

• Build investment courage and appeal
• Build regional industry collaboration and synergy

A key part of the preferred future vision is around industry innovation and helping expand critical industry clusters. While food and agriculture will remain mainstay economic drivers, the region also supports other strong economic concentrations, including manufacturing and healthcare clusters. A critical part of this strategic pillar is facilitating new investments and capital attraction to the region. This should be focused on expanding the existing industry and economic base, but also finding creative ways to support new sectors.

• The Greater Mankato region is characterized by the diversity of its economic drivers. This creates some deeper resilience in the regional economy, and the potential for sustained growth.
• The region is competing with other locations for investment capital. The stakeholder engagement has highlighted the desire to create closer connection with the investment community, to better understand how make the region appealing for capital investment.
• Industry synergy helps build on core strengths, and creates collaborative solutions to shared challenges such as workforce.

Actively build industry clusters

• Industry cluster models can be particularly effective at building synergy and creating new connections across existing industry ecosystems. This approach is particularly good in tackling shared challenges such as workforce, technical assistance and investment attraction. The cluster approach helps bring greater focus on what might be otherwise disparate groups of businesses. This strategic action areas connects strongly to Pillars 1 (Human Talent) and 2 (Food and Bioeconomy).

Connect with the investment community

• Building strong connections with the investment community will be critical to facilitating new capital investment to propel industry expansion and scale. This connection will also help provide critical information about the perceived performance of the region, and how it rates against other locations and regions. Conversely, it will also help build the awareness and understanding about the region, and its aspirations and future potential.

Expand political heft and influence

• The Greater Mankato region has an important task to build its heft and influence with State and national policy makers. In the broader Midwest region, people are increasingly concentrating in the large metropolises, and the weight of influence can change. Making and maintaining the case for the region will help ensure government funding initiatives consider the region, and not just gravitate to the very large urban centers.