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In an active industrial corridor on Chicago’s near west side sits PortionPac, an example
of forward thinking business practices, and a leader in emerging green technologies. Serving
the janitorial industry, Portion Pac has learned to cut packaging and streamline production,
helping both the environment and the bottom line. “One of the most interesting things
about manufacturing is that it also occurs at the boundary between the public world and
private world. And the best way to see that is through innovation. “That’s why IMEC
chose PortionPac as the perfect backdrop for a discussion with local, state, and federal
leaders about transit manufacturing. “We’re a small to medium size business,
we want to use every single tool that is out there to survive. So if we can have a public
partnership with the city of Chicago or with IMEC, or with NIST in a bigger sense. Those
are all helpful to us. Getting the insight like from IMEC and what they are doing and
what other manufacturers are doing. Those are helpful. You can’t just sit in your
building and be in a vacuum and think that somehow ideas are magically going to come
to you out of your head. You have to go out there, you have to go out there and explore
every single partnership that you can in order to keep the company alive and successful and
moving forward.” “The best notion of the economy is that it is a partnership between
the private and public sectors. Neither can operate without the other. It is a mistake
to think of companies operating in a vacuum. It’s a mistake for government to think that
it can operate without the private sector, and a very vibrant private sector. The important
thing is to understand how they best fit together.” Having balance between an organizations and
a culture that supports innovation will continue to keep this public and private partnerships
as effective as possible. And as such, IMEC will continue its mission of bringing government
and business leaders to further manufacturing in Illinois.