Four Northeast Ohio organizations are one group of just 20 national winners of the Obama administration's $37 million Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge, a multi-agency competition to support the advancement of high-growth industry clusters across the country.

NorTech, JumpStart, MAGNET and Lorain County Community College came together to cooperatively apply for the $2 million grant that will help create jobs in the region. The program, the Northeast Ohio Speed-To-Market Accelerator (STMA), is designed to accelerate the speed-to-market for near-production or pilot-production prototypes in the advanced energy and flexible electronics industry clusters in Northeast Ohio.

The fact that the groups collaborated on the project is no surprise.

“There’s a history of organization in this region -- we work together collaboratively all the time,” says Cathy Belk, chief relationship officer with JumpStart. “The fact that we already knew each other made it easy to identify the needs and work together on the proposal.”

Each organization will assist in its area of expertise, from company advising to workforce development. The STMA consists of three components, explains Byron Clayton, vice president of NorTech. “The first step is holding outreach workshops to let companies know the service areas we are targeting. The second step is one-on-one counseling and a path-to-market analysis. The third step is to deliver the services.”

Aside from offering expertise and guidance, the four groups plan to speed up the jobs creation process within new companies. “We are asking what can we do to help you to speed this process up,” says Clayton. “We’re working together as a region, as a network of nationally-recognized organizations.”

Sources: Cathy Belk, Byron Clayton
Writer: Karin Connelly