Industry hubs

If the community desires better jobs on island, then we need to set up an industry hub where inputs can be developed into secondary and tertiary products for local and export development. That sounds very grand. Yet it is already happening on Bowen. There is a quarry. It supplies rocks and gravel that we would otherwise have to import from off island. There is an apple orchard that now wants to produce a product for sale on island. Food grown by local farmers is packaged and sold to restaurants and the public. Beauty and body products are made here from raw materials imported from elsewhere. We need to think about the resources we have and how they could be further processed into other goods. From there we can map out the supporting businesses that can be built to support that industry hub. This is a more advanced concept than just have a random group of businesses rent space in an industrial park. It is a planned cluster of interdependent businesses. There is a hub and many spokes. As many resources (inputs) as we can would be acquired on island. I don't have an idea for what the hub business could be. And to be resilient, you would want to set up more than one hub at the same time, ideally that share similar spokes so no one has all revenue coming from one business. But a place to start is to help owners of resources expand their scope of what's possible with their resource. Does the quarry provide all materials to all building projects? With a different grinder, can it make a variety of products suitable for other uses? Is there enough supply to service other islands? Can local truckers and marinecraft ship the quarry's products without using the ferry? What about the marine repair industry? Many boats in the region, not so many places to have them repaired without a lot of hassle. Economic development thinking means working through many scenario (gold can be found where there are hassles, challenges, complaints and uncertainties) to find the interdependencies and help those interested entrepreneurs become engaged in building the spokes. This is the work many states undertook (Clean Washington Center for example) to generate secondary uses for waste materials. They facilitated the birth of many businesses. Today there are solutions for many waste streams and many new jobs and entrepreneurs.