Leadership Groups and the Next Stage of the BIC

When we opened the Berkshire Innovation Center in February 2020, our mission was straightforward: give the region’s manufacturers, engineers, technologists, and educators a shared home. At the time, advanced manufacturing and technology already played an important role in our region’s economy, but we lacked a central place to bring people together, share equipment, and run high-level training programs. The building and our organization filled that gap. Five years later, that foundation is real and it’s humming.

Today, the question facing us is no longer about launching the BIC—it’s about maturing the BIC. How do we take five years of momentum, partnerships, and activity and channel it into long-term, sector-driven impact for the region and the Commonwealth?

One answer lies in the creation of the BIC Leadership Groups: new, cross-sector working groups designed to focus the BIC’s energy on the industries where the Berkshires have the most upside and potential to lead.

From Berkshire Blueprint to BIC Blueprint

To understand where these Leadership Groups come from, it helps to look back to 2019, when 1Berkshire released the Berkshire Blueprint 2.0, a ten-year strategic economic imperative that identified the region’s five core industry clusters. One of those clusters—Advanced Manufacturing & Engineering Services—is where the BIC naturally lives.

While the BIC was not created because of the Blueprint, the opening of the BIC in 2020 helped anchor that cluster. It gave the region a central node: a modern facility where manufacturing companies, subject-matter experts, students, startups, and educators could work shoulder to shoulder, test ideas, and build capacity.

As the BIC’s network deepened over the years, patterns emerged. Inside that Advanced Manufacturing cluster, we saw concentrated activity—and growing opportunity—in areas like Clean Energy and Climatetech, Advanced Optics, Robotics and Automation, AI and Data, and Life Sciences. These are not separate from manufacturing; they are part of its natural evolution, and represent the technologies shaping the future of the Commonwealth’s economy.

The BIC Leadership Groups are our way of digging deeper into that cluster—of turning broad regional strategy into sector-specific action.

A new model for sector-driven collaboration

Each BIC Leadership Group is built around a simple set of goals:

●       Bring industry, academia, and community partners together.

●       Identify a small number of shared challenges or opportunities in that sector.

●       Mobilize the people who have the expertise—and motivation—to take action.

●       Create projects that link regional needs with state priorities.

●       Build long-term capacity here in the Berkshires.

Every group has a similar structure but a different focus. Clean energy was the earliest mover. AI, Advanced Manufacturing, Advanced Optics, Robotics, and Life Sciences will follow in a staggered sequence. Some already have early membership forming; others are still in the design phase. But together, they give the BIC a framework for organizing complex work across multiple industries.

The Leadership Groups aren’t designed to be advisory boards. They’re meant to be small, durable teams that move real work forward, each one representing a blend of company leaders, researchers, educators, engineers, and community partners.

Clean Energy Leadership Group: An Early Prototype

The furthest along of these new groups is the Clean Energy Leadership Group (CELG). It formed organically during the development of BIC’s clean-energy initiatives and is led by a mix of BIC board members, industry partners, academic leaders, and climate-tech entrepreneurs. That diversity is not an accident—it’s the reason the group works. Clean energy is a systems problem, and solving complex systems issues requires people who don’t usually sit at the same table.  CELG has become the prototype for what the other Leadership Groups can and should be: focused, cross-sector, and rooted in real projects that serve regional and statewide goals.

That structure was visible during the group’s first public event on September 17, 2025, which brought dozens of people together at the BIC. Instead of a single keynote, the morning unfolded as a set of tightly connected perspectives on the same question:  What does practical decarbonization look like in Western Massachusetts and how can that help drive economic growth?

We began with a microgrid concept for the William Stanley Business Park, presented by our clean-energy intern, Isabella Hennessy.  Her analysis demonstrated how solar, storage, and smart controls could make the site more resilient and more attractive for companies—a clear example of how climate work and economic development can reinforce each other.

Next came Williams College, where leaders spoke candidly about the realities of decarbonizing a century-old campus: geothermal test wells that didn’t cooperate, a regional grid that is already at its limits, and the need to rethink buildings, distribution systems, and peak demand all at once. Their story was not a polished success narrative. It was a real-time view into the challenges that nearly every institution in the Commonwealth will face – even those that are both motivated and have the financial means to move big projects forward.

Finally, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center zoomed out to the statewide level. The discussion around grid modernization—doubling peak demand, integrating thousands of distributed devices, accelerating interconnection, and reshaping long-term planning—placed our local work within the broader decarbonization challenges Massachusetts is tackling.

The event wasn’t just informative. It showed the exact kind of collaboration the Leadership Groups are designed to create: local expertise, institutional experience, entrepreneurial innovation, and state-level context, all in one room trying to identify new opportunities and solve real world problems.

The Next Stage of the BIC

The BIC was built as a platform—a physical and organizational infrastructure meant to support our regional innovation economy. Over the last five years, that platform has matured. We’ve launched workforce programs, supported startups, hosted industry convenings, and built partnerships with universities and state agencies.

The Leadership Groups represent the next stage: a way to focus the platform, to guide the energy inside the BIC toward targeted, high-impact work in sectors that matter to Berkshire County and to Massachusetts.

As new groups in AI, Advanced Optics, Robotics, Life Sciences, and Advanced Manufacturing come online, they will build on the structure the CELG has pioneered. Each will have its own mission, its own partners, and its own agenda. But all will be grounded in the same belief that has guided the BIC since day one: when people work together, when expertise is shared rather than siloed, when we “do more together,” the region becomes stronger.

An Invitation

If you work in these sectors—or want to—now is the moment to get involved. Reach out to explore partnership opportunities. Help shape the future of the industries that will define the next decade in Western Massachusetts.

Five years in, the BIC has moved from launch to growth. With the Leadership Groups, we’re entering a new phase: one defined by focus, collaboration, and the long-term work of building the region’s future, sector by sector.