Muro and his colleagues also mapped their super-sector, and the results are surprising and instructive.
Then they set out to learn where this super-sector of advanced industries exists in the United States, and what lessons could be gleaned from those places.
But the super-sector is also at risk, Muro and his colleagues argue, because the U.S. runs a trade deficit in most advanced industries.
As a whole, the super-sector is responsible for seventeen per cent of U.S. G.D.P. and accounts for nearly two-thirds of our exports.
D.; nurture startups by getting them capital and other help; improve the pipeline of S.T.E.M. workers through schools, universities, and corporate-funded training programs; and collaborate to create local "ecosystems" that encourage super-sector companies to cluster together.
So Muro and his colleagues at Brookings Metropolitan Policy Programm identified a few simple traits that are associated with innovation, and grouped together the industries that share those traits to come up with what Muro describes as a "super-sector".
Some of the industries that comprise their super-sector have an old-fashioned ring ("Clay Products," "Ship and Boat Building," and "Metal Ore Mining" are grouped together with "Software Publishers and Communications Equipmentnt"), but they share two important features.
Much as Intel and other semiconductor manufacturers helped create Silicon Valley, the software company Novell — one of the flagships for the Utah super-sector — was founded in Provo, in the nineteen-seventies, and helped attract, and spawn, other local tech businesses.
