Industries Overview

Where can you find a diversified economy with the nation's second most highly educated workforce?

Welcome to New England's Knowledge Corridor (Hartford, CT - Springfield, MA)!

Two industry sectors have provided the backbone for the Knowledge Corridor economy for decades, if not centuries: Insurance/Financial Services and Precision Machining. The Insurance/Financial Services cluster is dominated by big players, in many cases Fortune 100 companies, including Aetna, Travelers, Phoenix, ING and The Hartford in Hartford (the “Insurance Capital”) and MassMutual in Springfield, the largest company by market cap in the state of Massachusetts.

While there are some big players in the Precision Machining industry, particularly the United Technologies family of companies, the region is more noted for the literally hundreds of smaller machines shops that have historically supported the firearms, defense and aerospace industries. Recently the sector has become part of the supply chain for emerging industries including medical devices and renewable energy.

Health care is a growing sector in the Corridor and, of course, New England’s Knowledge Corridor would not live up to its name without a major education cluster. Those two sectors support a nascent biotech and life science sector in the Corridor. Growth in these sectors is supported by trade associations such as BEACON, the Biomedical Engineering Alliance & Consortium, which facilitates collaborative research and industrial partnering and the facilitation of new developing medical technology companies. Read BEACON's report that provides an assessment of the broad medical device industry in the Knowledge Corridor placed in context with the medical device and technology industry of New England, the greater Northeast and the nation as a whole.

Click here to download the BEACON report