States and metropolitan areas need to focus. Ultimately, many in the group agreed that states and localities have key roles to play if U.S. metropolitan areas are going to monetize the digitization of manufacturing. With federal processes gridlocked, multiple workshop attendees agreed with City Innovate Foundation Board Chairman Peter Hirshberg that linking software and hardware and start-up and industry communities is “a distributed problem” that will be worked out city by city, ecosystem by ecosystem. In that vein, multiple attendees agreed that that states and localities are the natural leaders of bottom up initiatives to develop much better training and apprenticeship initiatives that leverage true public/private partnerships, as opposed to public systems that simply solicit input. Others stressed the need for regional maker communities and industry networks to link up more. And others stressed the need to shape urban innovation districts such as the emerging Warm Springs area in Fremont to foment collaboration.
Brookings Institution