2. Minutes of 6/4/10 Meeting - Laserfiche WebLink

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South Bend Redevelopment Commission Regular Meeting -June 4, 2010 necessary to take that from research in the lab to commercialization. Hopefully, some of our local businesses can assist with that. Maybe a company already in South Bend can build a prototype that is needed. We, the community, must start to look at our existing businesses. Research takes a long time to commercialize. Often times it's bio based, which requires FDA approval, which is very costly and very time consuming. There are many innovative ideas that can be commercialized much faster. And they are sitting here in our back yard---our existing businesses. We need a business asset inventory. That is very crucial. We also need to look at information technology businesses. We've been very good at that here and we shouldn't discount them. They don't sound very high tech, but they are. Information technology costs much less to develop, it comes to commercialization much more quickly and it is more sustainable more quickly. We need to be talent scouts, all of us. We also need clusters of similar businesses. Clusters of competitors, but who realize that the value of networking is more important than avoiding competition. Vendors with support services want to be near that cluster. South Bend needs to be building clusters. Education is the third column. Ivy Tech instituted a two year program, at the request of Notre Dame, to educate Notre Dame employees. They thought there might be twenty-five students. One hundred signed up. Those students are graduating this year. Most of them are going on to IUSB for a four-year degree. That's responding to the 14