Southern Windsor County belongs to a region which earned the nickname "Precision Valley" early in the twentieth century. The large numbers of companies specializing in precision manufacturing created wealth and a high standard of living. The opportunity for such was available to anyone willing to invest the time and energy to master requisite skills up through the 1970s. Precision Valley formerly employed thousands of workers in machine shops large and small, and was known as the "Machine Shop of New England." Consistent, however, with the overall trend of the latter half of the 20th Century, manufacturing entities were bought up by absentee owners. At the same time, globalization, automation and national economic mismanagement conspired to move manufacturing away from achieving efficiencies through economies of scale to improving profits by increasingly strong waves of cost reduction (primarily in payrolls.) The result in Springfield, Windsor, Claremont and Bellows Falls was that all of their large machine tool firms sold off their industrial sites or abandoned them in bankruptcy reorganizations.
Despite economic development measures and programs, the "Precision Valley," located between areas that are more scenic, are home to institutions of higher education, or which have an infrastructure more conducive to manufacturing, has yet to recover. As a result, the Southern Windsor County Incubator, Inc. (SWCI) was incorporated in 2005 for the purpose of:According to a Grant Agreement between the Springfield Regional Development Corporation (SRDC) and the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development which pre-dates the incorporation of SWCI, the business incubator was to "have considerable focus on the needs of 'sustainable technologies' and related businesses."
Much of the first year of SWCI’s existence was spent in turning the idea into reality. Several measures were taken to learn from the experience of other incubators. The Board of Directors visited VCET in Burlington, and during the brief tenure of an Executive Director, a representative was sent to the Annual Conference of the National Business Incubator Association.
In 2006, SWCI applied for and was awarded a grant in the amount of $20,720 from USDA Rural Development for a Technical Feasibility Study. This study focused on remanufacturing as a particular strength of the region.
A Strategic Plan was adopted by the Board of Directors in August 2007 and is available in pdf format