Knowledge-based Industries

Participants in the discussion on knowledge based industry saw the opportunity to make knowledge the key value-adding component of economy and a generator for new job creation.

Pursuing this general strategy would mean working tolinkuniversities, corporations, government, and communities in this process. It would also mean making quality of life a key issue – both as a way of drawing, keeping, brain-workers, and as something these new industries would help produce.

The proposed next steps were simply togo to work. If we start working on the problems at hand, everything we need to decide about partners, processes, organization, implementation and more, will fall into place.

Included in the specific strategies for developing knowledge-based industries were: creating a "brownfields institute" and market ourselves as "the guys who solved Love Canal;" establishing a cross-border university or an alliance of institutions to begin to organize the knowledge that comes from working on indigenous problems; developing industry specific knowledge, such as the knowledge that comes out of the region’s wine-making industry; developing and marketing knowledge about the "border business;" and establishing a "peace institute" or site a unit of the United Nations here.