It's Your Business: Indiana's Team Crane shines bright at annual Congressional event

Hoosiers gathered in our nation’s capital July 9-10 for the annual Team Crane Congressional reception and breakfast. The events bring together government leaders, defense and technology firms and academia partnerships to learn about critical updates and developments across Indiana’s growing ecosystem, spearheaded by Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC), Crane Division , Naval Support Activity Crane and Crane Army Ammunition Activity (CAAA) .

Indiana Senators Mike Braun and Todd Young, Indiana Congressman Larry Bucshon and Congresswoman Erin Houchin hosted the breakfast sponsored by Applied Research Institute , Indiana Economic Development Corp. and Radius Indiana . Key leaders from NSWC and CAAA headlined the event to share Crane’s impact to the state and national defense mission.

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This year’s theme was Building the Competitive Advantage through Enduring Collaboration. Team Crane fosters its innovation ecosystem, which is comprised of over 200 different organizations, all coming together to accelerate the development of technical capabilities and support our nation’s warfighters.

For the third year, as a prelude to the breakfast, Crane Regional Defense Group (CRDG) brought together stakeholders throughout the ecosystem for its annual networking event hosted in downtown Washington. More than 150 guests enjoyed the event with fellow defense industry peers along with academic and government officials to discuss innovation, the current state of defense and future collaboration opportunities. CRDG officers and members were available to discuss the organization’s role in the southern Indiana community as an effort to expand community support and advocacy for Crane at local and federal levels.

These partnerships with academia, industry, public-private organizations and entrepreneurs not only result in the delivery of innovative technology to warfighters, but also significantly impact the regional economy. Through leveraging diverse workforce expertise, state-of-the-art laboratories and hi-technology equipment, the collective innovation ecosystem provides agile, robust capability to the warfighter to better equip them with a decisive advantage over the nation’s adversaries. Through these events, Team Crane can share its industry-changing capabilities with the country and beyond.

Matt Craig is director of Crane Community Support for Radius Indiana .

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: It's Your Business: Indiana's Team Crane shines bright at annual Congressional event