Welcome to the STARS Initiative. The STARS initiative stands for Strategic Teams Accelerating Regional Stimuli and is being facilitated by the Northeastern Pennsylvania Technology Institute. The program kicked off in September 2004. Our goal is to harness the knowledge and energies embedded within our institutions of higher education and transfer them into the business community. Accomplishing this goal requires three steps:

• select targets of opportunity


• generate tangible action items around the opportunities


• implement the ideas

Due to national trends and strengths that exist within our academic and business communities, we’ve selected four targets of opportunity: Nanotechnology, Homeland Security, Healthcare, and Life Sciences. Now with a talented group of volunteers, we created an action plan highlighting two or three items around each target of opportunity. The action items included collaborative research, community partnerships or technology transfer activities. Finally, with the assistance of the STARS Teams, we prioritized the action items and identified the required resources to implement each plan.

The initiative followed a strict and very focused schedule. It included three or four 90-minute, task driven meetings for each of the four teams held during a 120-day period.