Karen Gordon Mills, confirmed earlier this month as the new SBA Administrator, has a unique set of qualifications for the position: Baker Scholar at Harvard Business School, General Foods product manager, McKinsey consultant, Chair of the Council on Competitiveness and the Economy for the state of Maine, and co-author of a Brookings Institute paper on the importance of industrial clusters in bolstering U.S. competitiveness. According to the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, “clusters are geographic concentrations of interconnected companies, specialized suppliers, service providers, and associated institutions in a particular field that are present in a nation or region. Clusters arise because they increase the productivity with which companies can compete.”
