By Catherine Rampell
via nytimes.com

Workers are dropping out of the labor force in droves, and they are mostly women. In fact, many are young women. But they are not dropping out forever; instead, these young women seem to be postponing their working lives to get more education. There are now — for the first time in three decades — more young women in school than in the work force.

“I was working part-time at Starbucks for a year and a half,” said Laura Baker, 24, who started a master’s program in strategic communications this fall at the University of Denver. “I wasn’t willing to just stay there. I had to do something.”

Many economists initially thought that the shrinking labor force — which drove down November’s unemployment rate — was caused primarily by discouraged older workers giving up on the job market. Instead, many of the workers on the sidelines are young people upgrading their skills, which could portend something like the postwar economic boom, when millions of World War II veterans went to college through the G.I. Bill instead of immediately entering, and overwhelming, the job market.

Now, as was the case then, one sex is the primary beneficiary. Though young women in their late teens and early 20’s view today’s economic lull as an opportunity to upgrade their skills, their male counterparts are more likely to take whatever job they can find. The longer-term consequences, economists say, are that the next generation of women may have a significant advantage over their male counterparts, whose career options are already becoming constrained.

For now at least, many young women still feel that the deck is stacked against them.

“Almost everyone in my program is female,” said Ms. Baker, who hopes a master’s degree will help her get a job running communications at a nonprofit group. “That’s partly because of the program, but also because as women we feel like we have to be more educated to be able to compete in really any field.”

Women still earn significantly less than men. And in the two and a half years since the recovery officially began, men age 16 to 24 have gained 178,000 jobs, while their female counterparts have lost 255,000 positions, according to the Labor Department.

Apparently discouraged by scant openings, 412,000 young women have dropped out of the labor force entirely in the last two and a half years, meaning they are not looking for work.

Among young men, the labor force fell during the recession but has been flat since the recovery began. Today, across all age groups, an unemployed female worker is 35 percent more likely to drop out of the labor force in the next month than an unemployed male worker.

Some studies suggest that women are pickier about their job choices than men. Already earning lower pay, women are less willing to work when wages fall further, especially if they are able to rely on an employed (and these days, often newly re-employed) husband. Women are also more reluctant to work night or weekend shifts, according to government data on how Americans spend their time, partly because they have more family responsibilities.

“The jobs out there just aren’t very good, and men seem more willing to take them for whatever reason,” said Jonathan L. Willis, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. “The women are looking at those same jobs and saying, ‘I’ll be more productive elsewhere.’ ”

Then there are societal influences that affect a person’s willingness to take a lesser job or return to school.

“There is still this heavy cultural message that men should be out there earning money and supporting themselves, and they feel more distressed by losing their breadwinner role,” said Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families. “We’ve made much more progress overcoming the ‘feminine mystique’ than this masculine mystique.”

While these roles evolve, community colleges are reporting record enrollment.

Both men and women are going back to school, but the growth in enrollment is significantly larger for women (who dominated college campuses even before the financial crisis). In the last two years, the number of women ages 18 to 24 in school rose by 130,000, compared with a gain of 53,000 for young men.

The education gap aside, in some ways young women will already have an advantage over men in the coming decade. Many of the occupations expected to have the most growth, like home health aides and dental hygienists, have traditionally been filled by women. That is not to say that men cannot take those positions, but they may not want to.

“Today young girls are told they can do anything, go into any occupation. But if boys express any interest in traditionally female occupations, they get teased and bullied,” Ms. Coontz said. “Lots of guys are not understanding what’s happening to traditional low-income or middle-income male jobs.”

Jobs in the male-dominated manufacturing industry and in other sectors involving manual labor have been, and still are, in structural decline. These careers can also be hard to maintain indefinitely because youthful strength eventually fades. And now many manufacturing workers do not have pensions to carry them through when their bodies do break down.

“It doesn’t surprise me that in a poor economy women are ramping up their schooling,” said Heather Boushey, an economist at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning research organization. “The real question is: Why aren’t more men doing that too?”

The main risk in going back to school is the accompanying student loan debt. Tuition increases have been outpacing inflation for years, a trend accelerated by state budget cuts.

“Our funding per student has been cut 25 percent in the last three years,” said Stephen Scott, the president of Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, N.C., which is one of the fastest-growing community colleges in the country. Consequently, class sizes have risen, and so has tuition. But the students — again, mostly women — still pour in.

“We now have 6,000 students on a waiting list because we didn’t have the resources to offer more classes,” he said.

Those attending more expensive private schools, like Ms. Baker, will have an even tougher time guaranteeing that their educational investment pays off. Including the loans that financed her undergraduate education at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, she will complete her master’s program next year owing about $200,000 in debt.

“I have to have faith that I will eventually get a good job that pays enough to pay my living expenses and pay back my loans,” she said, “and hopefully make me happy in the process.”

By Adam Davidson
via npr.org

Three months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Angus Echols, a member of DuPont’s executive committee, began shaping the chemical giant’s plans for the coming decade. The U.S. would soon be at war, he explained in a series of memos and high-level discussions, and the company needed to aid the effort. But it also needed to think far ahead. When the war ended, Echols argued, women would want to buy cheap stockings. And where was DuPont on this crucial matter?

Echols got his way. While DuPont provided nylon (among other things) to the U.S. military for parachutes and tires, its research department studied how to make stockings on the cheap and did work that eventually led to Orlon and Lycra. And eight days after the Japanese surrender, DuPont announced that it would shift nylon production from war materiel to ladies’ undergarments. Not only did veterans have solid jobs to return to, but the company dominated the burgeoning synthetic fiber and plastics business for decades to come.

The image of thousands of industrial researchers in white lab coats and thick black glasses may seem antiquated, but corporate research and development is more important to our economy now than ever. Whereas a company used to be able to invent some new thing — nylon stockings, say — and spend a decade making money off it, today’s products have much shorter shelf lives. The venerable Western Electric 500 telephone — you know, the boxy one with the slanted face for the dial or, later, touch pad — was developed in 1949 and remained one of the most popular models through the 1980s. Now a phone like the Motorola RAZR or the first-generation iPhone goes from coveted totem to valueless relic (to hipster accessory) in a year or two. I recently visited an Amish buggy auction where salespeople were showing off the awesome features — easy-clean windows, retractable carved wooden cup holders — on the new year’s model. These days, all successful U.S. businesses have become innovation-based companies.

As consumers, we don’t care if our products are invented in the U.S. or in some other country. But as a work force, we should. While much has been written about Chinese factories’ stealing U.S. manufacturing jobs and destroying our businesses, the two countries have reached an uneasy, unspoken economic agreement over the past decade. American firms find they can compete with low-cost manufacturing by constantly developing new products. This has worked out well for U.S. companies — though, notably, not for U.S. manufacturing workers — because there are much fatter margins in owning the intellectual property of a hot new thing than there is in churning out a huge volume of cheap components. And these higher margins manifest themselves in higher salaries for American workers.

Partly as a result, the U.S. still dominates the world of research and development, as it has for more than a century. The country spends nearly double the annual R.-and-D. budgets of Japan and Germany combined. But China’s decadelong rise from a nonplayer in R. and D. to the world’s second-largest spender poses a serious threat. A recent study by the Battelle Memorial Institute, a research firm, predicts that China’s spending will match ours around 2022. In research terms, that is effectively today.

China already has plans to focus on exciting but vague ideas now — like green energy and bio- and nanotechnology — that will most likely become products in the 2020s. And if U.S. government labs, university departments and corporate researchers aren’t already on top of the next generation of breakthroughs, the country will very likely fall behind in 10 or 20 years when those innovations become marketable products. Our global competitiveness is based on being the origin of the newest, best ideas. How will we fare if those ideas originate somewhere else? The answers range from scary to scarier. Imagine a global economy in which the U.S. is playing catch-up with China: while a small class of Americans would surely find a way to profit, most workers would earn far less, and the chasm between classes could be wider than ever.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much to prevent this trend. Overall government research spending (relative to G.D.P.) has been heading down since its peak in the space-race years of the 1960s. And because it’s nearly impossible to imagine Congress significantly increasing research financing, any growth in long-term R. and D. will be, largely, up to the private sector.

And that’s the real problem. From a C.E.O.’s perspective, long-term R. and D. is a lousy investment. The projects cost a lot of money and often fail. And even when they work, some other company can come along and copy all the best ideas free. Charles Holliday Jr., the C.E.O. of DuPont who retired three years ago, told me that it’s tough to get investors to think more than two years ahead — at most. “The stock market pays you for what you can do now,” he said. As a result, DuPont isn’t the only American company changing the way it does R. and D. Corporate research labs at I.B.M., AT&T, Xerox and others have also been slimmed way down or cut altogether.

The government can’t simply pass a law forcing companies to think longer-term, of course. But Congress can do other things, like shift incentives away from rampant short-termism. It could, for example, reduce capital-gains taxes on stocks held for many years. Alternately, companies could create different classes of stock, giving more voting rights to those who hold the stocks longer. Another idea popular among businesspeople: enticing foreign Ph.D. students to develop their new ideas in the U.S.

The question of how U.S. companies will make a buck has probably never been more important. With one war over and another winding down, thousands of young men 25 and under, many without college degrees, will soon enter a work force with no place for them. (Their unemployment rate is nearly double the already miserable national average.) We have no idea how an Iraq war veteran will make a living a decade or two from now. We can only hope there is someone still being paid to figure it out.

By Peter O’Dowd
via npr.org

On the western edge of Phoenix, it’s easy to find vast tracts of empty land once prepped for two-by-fours and work crews. Utility stanchions emerge like errant whiskers from the desert floor.

This is the land of zombie subdivisions. Some experts believe up to 1 million dirt lots in central Arizona were in some stage of approval for new homes when the market crashed.

“It’s tragic,” says Realtor Greg Swann. “It’s heartbreaking.”

Urban planners are floating a radical solution for areas like this. It’s known as “smart decline.”

Justin Hollander, an assistant professor at Tufts University, wrote a book called Sunburnt Cities, about smart decline in the Southwest. After the bust, he says, more than a third of ZIP codes in major Sun Belt cities saw population losses.

“People are leaving,” Hollander says. “So that means all the houses, all the roads and infrastructure that supports those houses, it doesn’t just disappear.”

In some cases, Hollander calls for tearing down that infrastructure. He points to some Rust Belt cities that took generations to realize the depth of their problems.

“If you don’t do a good job, it further destabilizes the neighborhood,” he says. “It further creates a cycle of disinvestment.”

On the western edge of Phoenix, it’s easy to find vast tracts of empty land once prepped for two-by-fours and work crews. Utility stanchions emerge like errant whiskers from the desert floor.

This is the land of zombie subdivisions. Some experts believe up to 1 million dirt lots in central Arizona were in some stage of approval for new homes when the market crashed.

“It’s tragic,” says Realtor Greg Swann. “It’s heartbreaking.”

Urban planners are floating a radical solution for areas like this. It’s known as “smart decline.”

Justin Hollander, an assistant professor at Tufts University, wrote a book called Sunburnt Cities, about smart decline in the Southwest. After the bust, he says, more than a third of ZIP codes in major Sun Belt cities saw population losses.

“People are leaving,” Hollander says. “So that means all the houses, all the roads and infrastructure that supports those houses, it doesn’t just disappear.”

In some cases, Hollander calls for tearing down that infrastructure. He points to some Rust Belt cities that took generations to realize the depth of their problems.

“If you don’t do a good job, it further destabilizes the neighborhood,” he says. “It further creates a cycle of disinvestment.”

Hope For The Zombies

Jim Holway works for the Tucson-based Sonoran Institute, a group that promotes sustainable development in the West. And he has hope for some of the zombie subdivisions.

“I tend to assume that we will grow again,” he says. “Is it possible the forces that drove the growth in the West really have come to an end? I think it’s unlikely. Certainly this is a time for creative thinking.”

He agrees that letting land go back to nature — farming or desert — is one solution for the most unattractive zombie areas. But says the land closest to the urban core still has a chance.

And that raises another option: Start over.

Creative Redevelopment

That’s the approach the city of Maricopa, south of Phoenix, is taking.

During the boom, Maricopa planners issued 600 housing permits a month. After the bust, a single piece of land with room for 182 houses was rezoned for mixed use. The Roman Catholic Church bought it, and now there are plans for a private school, shops at ground level and loft-style housing above.

Brent Billingsley, the city of Maricopa’s development services director, says this type of creative redevelopment didn’t happen before.

“Everyone has taken this opportunity to catch our breath and take a look at how we want to grow in the future,” he says. “And we’ve been at a balance now for the last couple years and able to catch up and to be smarter.”

Still, it will take Maricopa years to swallow the 16,000 lots set aside for residential development. Public swimming pools, baseball fields and schools will replace some of those zombie subdivisions.

Meanwhile, on the west side of town, Swann just chuckles at the idea of “smart decline.”

“At some point, sometime fairly soon, this land will be profitable again, and it will turn into houses,” he says. “And you’ll drive by this five years from now, and you won’t remember that you were here because it will be completely different. That’s the way Phoenix works. Phoenix changes like dreams.”

By Patrick McGeehan and Kirk Semple
via nytimes.com

Affluent foreigners are rushing to take advantage of a federal immigration program that offers them the chance to obtain a green card in return for investing in construction projects in the United States. With credit tight, the program has unexpectedly turned into a mainstay for the financing of these projects in New York, California, Texas and other states.

The number of foreign applicants, each of whom must invest at least $500,000 in a project, has nearly quadrupled in the last two years, to more than 3,800 in the 2011 fiscal year, officials said. Demand has grown so fast that the Obama administration, which is championing the program, is seeking to streamline the application process.

Still, some critics of the program have described it as an improper use of the immigration system to spur economic development — a cash-for-visas scheme. And an examination of the program by The New York Times suggests that in New York, developers and state officials are stretching the rules to qualify projects for this foreign financing.

These developers are often relying on gerrymandering techniques to create development zones that are supposedly in areas of high unemployment — and thus eligible for special concessions — but actually are in prosperous ones, according to federal and state records.

One of the more prominent projects is a 34-story glass tower in Manhattan that is to cost $750 million, one-fifth of which is to come from foreign investors seeking green cards. Called the International Gem Tower, it is rising near Fifth Avenue in the diamond district of Manhattan, one of the wealthiest areas in the country.

Yet through the selective use of census statistics, state officials have classified the area as one plagued by high unemployment, the federal and state records show. As a result, the developer has increased the project’s chances of attracting foreigners who will accept little, if any, return on their investment in the project if it means they can secure American visas for their families.

A senior federal immigration official, Alejandro Mayorkas, acknowledged in an interview on Friday that the program might need more scrutiny. Mr. Mayorkas and other federal officials said they were concerned that some of the maps that New York and other states were approving might not adhere to the spirit and intent of the regulations.

The Times’s review of the program in New York indicates that several other major projects are also based on questionable maps.

For example, the Battery Maritime Building, at the foot of Manhattan near Wall Street, has been classified as being located in an area that needs help attracting jobs. That designation is the result of a development zone whose outlines resemble a gerrymandered political district, project documents show.

The zone snakes up through the Lower East Side, skirting the wealthy enclaves of Battery Park City and TriBeCa, and then jumps across the East River to annex the Farragut Houses project in Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn.

In fact, the small census tract that contains the Farragut Houses has become a go-to area for developers seeking to use the visa program: its unemployed residents have been counted toward three projects already.

The giant Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, which abuts well-heeled brownstone neighborhoods, has also qualified for the special concessions using a gerrymandered high-unemployment district: the crescent-shaped zone swings more than two miles to the northeast to include poor sections of Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant. A local blogger and critic of Atlantic Yards, Norman Oder, has referred to the map as “the Bed-Stuy Boomerang.”

Since 2008, developers have raised or have planned to raise close to $1 billion on these projects in New York City, according to federal and state records. Almost all of that money would come in increments of $500,000 — much of it from residents of China — and pour into wealthy areas.

In interviews, New York State economic-development officials praised the program but were reluctant to accept responsibility for administering it. Indeed, some state officials who certified projects for the program acknowledged that they did not know what was being built. They said they were following guidance from federal regulators.

“This program serves as a valuable tool to support job-creating projects that will put areas of high unemployment on a continued path to economic recovery and growth,” said Austin Shafran, a spokesman for Empire State Development, the state agency that oversees the program in New York.

Urged on by federal and state officials, investors in faraway places like Shanghai and Seoul along with American developers have been flocking to the program, which was created by Congress during the recession of 1990.

Under the program, known as EB-5, investors receive a visa that provides residency for two years and can be converted into a permanent green card if the holders can show the investment produced at least 10 jobs, even if the project has not been completed.

With the surge in EB-5 projects, many lawyers and consultants, in the United States and overseas, are getting involved. In China alone, more than 500 agents are jockeying to connect wealthy Chinese people to American developers, experts said.

Investors throng EB-5 conferences. Many, successful in their own countries, said they wanted to secure American residency for their children. But the competition has given rise to unsavory practices, EB-5 lawyers and consultants said, like agents who falsely promise guaranteed returns.

The minimum investment in the program was set at $1 million and has not changed in more than 20 years. But if the project is in a rural area or a place where the unemployment rate is 50 percent above the national average, the threshold for investing is $500,000, not $1 million.

By creating development zones that are ruled eligible for $500,000 investments, urban developers are at an advantage in luring contributions.

The zone drawn up for the Gem Tower consists of two census tracts in Midtown Manhattan. According to census figures, the tract that contains the project had an unemployment rate of zero for the last five years.

But the State Labor Department calculated that there were enough unemployed people in an adjoining census tract — one that includes Times Square — to justify calling the small zone an area of high unemployment.

Lela Goren, director general of Extell New York Regional Center, which is helping to raise the EB-5 investments for the Gem Tower, said she could not explain how the tower’s zone qualified as needy. “It qualifies, whatever the numbers, and it got approved,” Ms. Goren said.

The consultants arranging the EB-5 financing for the Battery Maritime and Atlantic Yards projects declined to comment.

Officials in other states expressed dismay over how New York developers were using the program. They said New York was unfairly siphoning off investments from less-developed areas.

“A lot of projects are in areas that are head-scratchers,” said James Candido, an official with Vermont’s Department of Economic Development.

Other states have sometimes not allowed such questionable development zones. California told a developer to relocate a manufacturing plant for a surgical-products company from a more prosperous part of San Jose to a poorer one, said Brook J. Taylor, a spokesman for the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development in California.

Federal regulators said states determined whether projects were located in areas of “greatest need.”

“The question is, are the state authorities adhering to the spirit of the law?” said Mr. Mayorkas, the federal immigration official who is the director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. “Where is the project being developed, and where are the jobs being created? Are the people from the areas of high unemployment being employed? Because that’s really the purpose. If they’re not being hired from those areas, then the question is justified.”

Mr. Mayorkas, whose staff has been scrambling to keep up with the boom in the program, said in the interview on Friday that he was concerned about allegations of gerrymandering.

If some project designations were not achieving “legislative intent,” he said, “then I think that is something that we need to consider as the laws are reviewed.”

By Jim Witkin
via www.nytimes.com


In the world of computers, Silicon Valley is recognized as the spawning ground of technology start-ups. For financial institutions, Lower Manhattan has long been the place to set up shop.

And of course Detroit has historically served as the epicenter of American automaking, evolving in recent times from a manufacturing center to a headquarters city. Still, there is no guaranty that its dominance is permanent.

Among the places vying to become a nexus of automotive development is this college town of 140,000 at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, some 1,300 miles from the Motor City. Already it has earned a reputation as one of the country’s leading engine and transportation research centers, digging into the dirty business of civilizing some of the industry’s biggest and least sophisticated engines.

The Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory here, part of Colorado State University’s school of mechanical engineering, was founded 20 years ago by Bryan Willson. The results of its work, especially in fuel injection and ignition systems, have been adopted by major industry suppliers like Delphi, Bosch and Eaton, component providers to auto, truck and industrial engine makers.

Work at the laboratory also involves emerging technologies — smart grids, electric vehicle components, alternative fuels and new twists on conventional drivetrains — that will be vital for transportation systems of the future.

Bringing this work to market will require a new approach. “With such a diversity of new technologies, you are starting to see expertise emerge and new businesses form in places like Silicon Valley, Austin and Colorado,” Dr. Willson said. “I expect much of this will not happen in Detroit.”

Many start-ups, hoping to commercialize these new technologies, have already formed or been drawn to the area as a result of programs sponsored by the city of Fort Collins in collaboration with local companies. The goal, according to Josh Birks, the city’s economic adviser, is to build a critical mass of clean tech and transportation-related businesses.

This transformation started with a competition. In 1990, General Motors, with the Energy Department as a co-sponsor, challenged 25 engineering schools around the country in a program that converted GMC 2500 Sierra pickups to run on natural gas. Though the Colorado State University team did not win the competition, placing second, the technology it developed proved useful for a fleet of natural gas hybrid buses operating in Denver.

From that experience, Dr. Willson took away a guiding principle that would inform his future work. “We didn’t want to just conduct experiments or write papers and have them sit on a shelf,” he said. “We wanted to have impact, so what we do here is the messy work to make sure these innovations actually become products.”

The lab’s messy work was evident on a tour through the facility. In one corner sat an enormous 140-liter natural gas-powered engine that once turned a compressor used on natural gas pipelines. Over the years, Dr. Willson and his students have pioneered several improvements to a computer-controlled fuel delivery system that greatly reduces the engine’s nitrogen oxide emissions.

Today the technology can be found on almost every gas pipeline engine in the country, and it has helped establish a national reputation for the laboratory. Enginuity, a start-up working here, commercialized much of this technology and in 2008 was acquired by Dresser-Rand, which supplies equipment to the oil and gas industry.

Nearby, a team of graduate students huddled around a large engine connected to a bank of diagnostic machines by a tangle of wires. A test of a laser ignition system, in which light rather than electric current runs over fiber-optic cables to optical spark plugs, was under way.

“If you look at the future of automotive engines,” Dr. Willson explained, “you are going to see higher levels of exhaust gas recirculation and a much more difficult ignition problem, one that we are looking to lasers to solve.”

Exhaust gas recirculation directs some of the engine’s exhaust back to the cylinders, where it combines with the air-fuel mix to help reduce nitrogen oxide emissions. Many automotive engines depend on this technology to meet emissions standards.

In the building’s basement is a small-scale electricity grid where, among other projects, students study the impact that a growing population of electric vehicles may have on the power distribution network. Behind the building, a company co-founded by Dr. Willson, Solix Biofuels, is developing a low-cost system for producing fuels from algae. Solix intends to license the technology to large energy producers.

In the far corner of the building was a Cummins diesel engine owned by VanDyne SuperTurbo, a spinoff from Woodward Governor, a large Fort Collins-based energy management company. VanDyne pays to use the laboratory’s resources, including several students, to conduct durability and emissions testing on its SuperTurbo technology, a device that adds a two-way mechanical drive to a turbocharger.

In this wrinkle on conventional turbocharger design, the engine can drive the turbo directly, and the turbo can push power back into the engine through a direct mechanical link, a system known as turbocompounding. Testing suggests that the technology could offer fuel efficiency gains and carbon-dioxide-emission reductions of 30 percent, enabling automakers to use smaller engines.

VanDyne is in its second round of venture financing and talking to several truck and auto diesel engine manufacturers, according to its chief executive, Ed VanDyne. It recently signed a deal with the Army, which will test the SuperTurbo on its tanks and heavy vehicles.

For its first three years, VanDyne occupied space at the Rocky Mountain Innosphere in Fort Collins, a nonprofit business incubation program started in 2007 and supported by the university, local businesses and the city. Since then, the program has created 27 companies that now employ 133 high-tech workers, according to Mike Freeman, who serves as chairman of the Innosphere board.

Mr. Birks, the Fort Collins economic adviser, said the Innosphere was emblematic of the city’s commitment to what he called “the front end of business formation.” Through this program, VanDyne received low-cost office space and free access to patent lawyers and accountants, as well as help developing business plans and raising financing.

High-tech businesses in the area can also participate in one of the local innovation clusters where local start-ups and established companies in related industries work together, with help from the university and city on marketing and skill-building. Initiatives typically involve projects in the community that allow member companies to showcase their capabilities.

Once these start-ups can stand on their own through the efforts of Innosphere or one of the cluster programs, most are choosing to stay in the area, Mr. Birks said. “What we are seeing is that corporate headquarters, research and development and the prototyping all stay fairly close to where the company was incubated and founded,” he said.

Other companies are choosing to move to the area. One, Czero, is working with the engines laboratory to develop a hydraulic hybrid kit that recovers energy when a vehicle is braking and is particularly suited for vehicles that make frequent stops.

“We moved our company from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins because the university and the city have created an amazing atmosphere here, very pro- business and pro-innovation,” said Guy Babbit, chief executive of Czero and director of the newly formed Colorado Engine and Transportation Innovation Cluster.

Because demands on the university’s engine research are increasing, it is planning a large addition, expected to begin construction next year. Dr. Willson has been approved by the city’s planning commission to rebuild the original smoke stacks on the historic Art Deco-style building. But he plans to replace them with wind turbines to generate electricity for the laboratory.

By Malia Spencer, Reporter
via Pittsburgh Business Times

The idea of onshoring — or work that was offshored to countries like China returning to the U.S. — is gaining traction with some Western Pennsylvania manufacturers (as reported in the Dec. 16 edition of the Pittsburgh Business Times) as more are reporting work returning or customers they hadn’t seen in years knocking at the door.

To help local manufacturers get a better handle on the onshoring, sometimes called reshoring, trend and how to capitalize on it, the nonprofit Catalyst Connection , along with the other local organizations, is working to bring the group Reshoring Initiative to town for an education session.

The Reshoring Initiative was founded by longtime tooling industry executive Harry Moser, and is sponsored by companies and industry organizations such as the National Tooling and Machining Association. The initiative touts a “Total Cost of Ownership” mentality when it comes to sourcing. By using that thought process, buyers take into account what the group calls the hidden costs of offshoring, such as logistics and quality control. The group has developed a software tool for manufacturers to make their cost case to potential customers.

Petra Mitchell, president and CEO of Catalyst Connection, which works with manufacturers on competitiveness, said the onshore topic is just surfacing among the thousands of companies Catalyst works with, but it is a tool that can help local firms if they know how to wield it.

“I think that our suppliers, the smaller companies that could benefit from larger companies, could be more proactive for helping their customers to make this business case,” Mitchell said. “Give them the talking points and make their own business case on why a new customer or existing customer should go with them over an overseas supplier.”

Typically, Moser said he educates the original equipment manufacturers on the Total Cost of Ownership, but since incorporating the Reshoring Initiative five months ago, he has been speaking with a growing number of suppliers.

“Times are right for it, the total Cost of Ownership is important for decisions,” Moser said. “It has the potential to be huge.”

As the education and conversation about onshoring continues, Bill Jones, president of Penn United Technologies Inc., already is feeling its ripple effects. He has some of the company’s major customers, including FCI and Tyco, talking about bringing more business back to the United States, and his 580-person company has hung on to some production stamping work for these customers, hoping to see more and maybe even add some of the tooling work.

“It’s all positive. It helps us to hire more people and build the pipeline here, (rather) than fill them halfway around the world,” Jones said. “When the customer comes back, we get more business because the supply chain comes back.”