Biography

Kristin Hedger is the Vice President of Business Development for Killdeer Mountain Manufacturing (KMM), a company her grandfather founded to create jobs for people in western North Dakota. They began manufacturing assemblies in support of defense-related electronics. Over time, through performance in support of our customer base, we were included in the Boeing Commercial Aerospace (BCA) supply chain.

She later started to work on some independent agriculture and energy-related initiatives in war-torn and developing nations. This was based on her passion for entrepreneurial endeavors and trying to use continuous improvement of relations between North Dakota industry and academic institutions to deal with such problems. They built the company’s connections in the Pentagon to form a small North Dakota-based private sector consortium to travel to Erbil, Kurdistan, Iraq to help the local population start a farm-to-market to cooling oil business and build a crushing plant.

Her team also worked to build on relations with our state’s National Guard Partnership for Peace arrangement Ghanaian military. They used the same model to successfully establish a workforce development training program. She was able to see first-hand the differences in tribal relations, bureaucratic differences, and other hurdles that our own economic development efforts and foreign aid organizations face promoting commerce. These endeavors achieved some successes and resulted in a lot of learning on both sides, and a genuine understanding of the potential for what the EXIM bank could do.

Her experience in the aerospace and defense industry has provided opportunities to learn about industry demands from the perspectives of developing countries such as India, and more developed allied nations, such as Australia and others.