Triangle should muster its clusters for growth.

• Position: Economic Outlook - Brief Article

Pedro Arboleda, 32, is a consultant with the Cambridge, Mass.-based Monitor Group, which teamed with Harvard professor Michael Porter to study the Raleigh-Durham metro area for the Washington, D.C-based Council on Competitiveness. The council is a nonprofit group of business executives and academics that promotes U.S competitiveness by studying the role clusters -- companies in the same region and field that are linked by customers and suppliers -- play in successful regional economies. Arboleda received a bachelor's in international studies from Georgetown University, a master's in Latin American studies from Stanford and an MBA from Cornell.

BNC: Why do you put so much emphasis on clusters?

Arboleda: If regions are to grow faster than their competitors, companies within clusters have to collaborate. They have to rally around common issues. Medical devices are regulated by FDA. If the companies in that cluster don't get together and influence the crafting of FDA guidelines, they might miss some growth opportunities. That's independent of them competing with each other, which also has to happen for them to grow.

The study suggests that the Triangle's development plan needs updating.

The initial strategy was based on Research Triangle Park. That was put in place in the late 1950s, early 1960s and further developed in the '70s and '80s But it has reached an inflection point. Not only is land getting scarcer within the park, but the more-rural regions around it have not benefited from the park's success. These need to be integrated into the expansion of the park or into the development of the region's economic-development objectives.

Could that hurt the metro area?

Actually, when we looked at the data -- surveys, interviews and cluster mapping -- it showed that there were some strengths around textiles and furniture, strengths that played to technology that was developed in the metro area but wasn't being applied there. It could be applied in rural counties.

Textiles and furniture aren't typically considered strengths these days.

A lot of regions, when they look at the future, tend to either forget about their traditional strengths or to minimize them, thinking they need to reinvent themselves and look at new and up-and-coming clusters. Every industry, every cluster, has high-tech components.

How does this relate to the Triangle?

The region already has high-tech thinking in its traditional industries, It just isn't being applied. A lot of the...