Virginia Economic Review

Since Drake Extrusion opened a plant in Southern Virginia to make polypropylene fibers and yarns 31 years ago, the company weathered the collapse of the region’s traditional industry and global downturns and never laid off a worker.

New or expanding companies want to know that they will be able to hire workers with the skills they need. While outside training providers offer established but generic faculty, facilities, and programs, in-house solutions allow for customization but require significant investment.

When President Donald Trump announced in June he would “unleash drone dominance,” it’s no surprise that the Commonwealth looked to NASA and its 108-year-old Langley Research Center in Hampton for guidance.

Connections are an essential foundation of business success — and businesses trust Virginia’s infrastructure to provide a multimodal transportation system that reliably connects them to suppliers, customers, and partners.

Virginia’s arts scene showcases the creative talent that comes out of the Commonwealth, from well-regarded arts programs at universities like Virginia Commonwealth University and Shenandoah University to self-taught artists.

Virginia’s long history and evolution since its founding have left a wide variety of unique attractions, from the historic to the entertaining to the just plain weird.

Virginia’s cities, counties, and towns represent a wide range of living situations, with a location to support any lifestyle.

Speed and efficiency are essential competitive edges for any manufacturing operation. Yet the growing adoption of advanced manufacturing techniques isn’t just boosting efficiency with how goods are produced — it’s changing the types of goods that can be made and where they are produced.

The global aerospace industry is reinventing itself, with innovation spanning materials, engineering, and a more expansive vision for how we take to the skies. Virginia sits at the heart of this transformation as a breeding ground for ingenuity.

Backed by monumental funding deals, a peaking business profile, and a strong entrepreneurial undercurrent, Virginia is building an accessible, collaborative, and truly thriving innovation ecosystem far and wide across the Commonwealth.

Maj. Gen. Ted Mercer is the new CEO and executive director of Virginia Space, the owner and operator of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), collocated at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Tad Deriso is president and CEO of Mid-Atlantic Broadband Communities Corporation (MBC), a South Boston-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization that has built an advanced open-access fiber optic network in Southern Virginia.

Beth Macy is a three-time New York Times-bestselling author. She is the author of “Factory Man,” “Truevine,” and “Dopesick,” books that tell separate stories, but all stories through which the challenges, issues, prospects, and hopes of rural America are studied in different ways.

Peter Beck is CEO, CTO, and founder of Rocket Lab, a private space company with commercial launch sites in New Zealand and Wallops Island on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Virginia's Surging Craft Beverage Industry Virginia's first brush with alcoholic beverage production came in 1620, when English settler George Thorpe distilled the first batch of corn whiskey in what would become the United States at the Jamestown settlement near Williamsburg.