High Tech in Rural America

Submitted on August 26, 2011 - 11:55am

Guest blog post by Patrick D. Gallagher, Commerce's Undersecretary of Standards and Technology and Director, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
That’s right. Rural America is also high tech. From the plains of the heartland to the cattle lands of the West and the rolling hills of farmlands in the East, our smaller communities are home to high-tech businesses that help expand U.S. exports and provide high-skilled, high-paying jobs.
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What’s different now is the strength of our competition from abroad. And that’s why President Obama is proposing a new NIST initiative, the Advanced Manufacturing Technology Consortia or AmTech.  Its goal is to accelerate the innovation process—discovery to invention to development of new manufacturing process technologies—to create skilled, high-wage manufacturing jobs.  It is a public-private partnership that optimizes advanced research so that our manufacturers, regardless of their location, have the technologies and data they need to continually improve their products and stay on the cutting edge.
NIST and the Department of Commerce are focused on helping U.S. companies bring to market the highest quality, most cost-effective products worldwide.


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