High-tech companies will make waves on the plains
By MICHAEL HOWIE
News-Gazette Staff Writer

   To Larry Smarr, the world changed in the early 1990s.
   That's when University of Illinois computer scientists working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications instigated that change by creating Mosaic, the first software that enabled ordinary folk to browse the World Wide Web.
   That led to exponential growth in the high-tech start-up industry, fed by venture capital, and the creation of the e-commerce world.
   Problem is, Smarr said, little of the economic explosion that's happened since has taken place in East Central Illinois.
   "In 1994, when Mosaic took off, and the whole Web took off, that sort of started a clock," said Smarr. "There's been a huge increase in companies created all over the country. Even though that seminal event occurred at the University of Illinois, most of the economic growth has happened elsewhere. So, in relative terms, our community has been falling behind.
   "If you ask how many dot-coms were being created in '94, there were hardly any. You can't have Amazon.com without the Web; you can't have Yahoo without the Web. It's only in the last five or six years that those companies have come into being. Unfortunately, most of them did not come into being here.
   "So we've been losing out on the creation of the New Economy. But fortunately, we now have everything in place to turn this around!"
   Like some sort of harmonic convergence, several things moved into place at the start of this year.
   Plans for a research park at the UI became a lot stronger, with the announcements about Motorola setting up shop there and the growth of the park from about 39 acres to 139 acres.
   Parkland College is positioning itself to train high-tech workers.
   Gov. George Ryan proposed a huge boost in technology spending by the state.
   President Clinton got into the act in his State of the Union address:
   "These kinds of innovations are also propelling our remarkable prosperity. Information technology only includes 8 percent of our employment, but now it counts for a third of our economic growth – along with jobs that pay, by the way, about 80 percent above the private sector average.
   "To accelerate the march of discovery across all these disciplines in science and technology, I ask you to support my recommendation of an unprecedented $3 billion in the 21st Century Research Fund, the largest increase in civilian research in a generation. We owe it to our future."
   That's going to mean change, in a big way, for East Central Illinois, Smarr said. More jobs. More wealth. More taxes for governments.
   "If you look at areas that have large research parks – Stanford, Berkeley, University of Washington in Seattle, San Diego and La Jolla, M.I.T., Harvard and Route 128 (in Boston), North Carolina and the Triangle Research Park, UIC and Northwestern – what you see is, first, an enormous transfer of wealth and tax base of the communities.
   "If you want money for your schools, if you want money for your streets, there are people with the wealth now to carry that along."
   East Central Illinois offers advantages to start-up and high-tech companies, Smarr said, compared with other established high-tech areas.
   "Many of these places are landlocked in ways we're not. We are land-rich.
   "That's one of the reasons you're going to see companies want to settle here, surrounded by land that is not developed.
   "You don't want to use the farmland up, but with these companies, you get the biggest return per acre."
   And the kind of industry that will come is the kind a community wants, Smarr said.
   "They're not polluting. The typical jobs that are generated are much higher-paying than the norm. That attracts people to come to your town to take those jobs. And it provides for a whole re-employment option."
   That comes in handy in a place like Champaign-Urbana, he noted, where often someone will be hired at the UI and that person's spouse needs a job.
   "It provides a whole second employment sector."
   Like others at the UI, he cites a "brain drain. The university's losing the battle for recruiting and retaining its top faculty."
   The environment here, he said, is such that a start-up company, with five or 10 employees, will do fine. But when that company begins to succeed, a larger company may acquire it and say, "Let's move you to Austin."
   "You lose all the growth you just made."
   With unemployment in single digits for the last several years, Smarr says "a broad initiative in training is needed to support the hiring requirements for a research park."
   "Throughout the Midwest, there are people who would like to get a second career by engaging in lifelong education. Our community college system combined with distance learning can give them a chance to participate in the New Economy."
   And they'll spend their wages here.
   "It's not just that the tax base helps the community as a whole, but it also provides an income base (for) a secondary set of things – restaurants, high-end shopping environments, specialty stores.
   "Typically, the people who are interested in this tend to care about the arts; they tend to support the theater; they tend to support music. I think it just gets better.
   "A high quality of life in some sense is a luxury. If you've got a family of four and you're just making it, how are you going to be able to send money to public radio?"
   The UI is a "tremendous" source of employees, most of whom leave when they finish their studies, Smarr said.
   "The real problem is to start keeping those people here," he said.
   But build a research park, and there's reason for those graduates to stick around.
   "That's why companies are going to flock to this area," with satellite divisions of their companies to employ UI grads.
   "Just doing it, just getting it started, is probably the biggest obstacle. Once there is a large research park, there is some place to bring your company to.
   "Champaign-Urbana is not the equal of Seattle or Boston or any of those places in terms of population. That's where scale comes in. I'd like to see the kind of growth that would provide a balance with the scale of the towns, and the scale of the university.
   "There're only so many people within 200 miles. Once you get a demand higher than that, you have to start importing, or we're going to run out of people. There'll be a sort of self-regulating scale to this."
   Smarr has been waiting for a university research park to develop since he came here 20 years ago.
   "It's a historic moment. All of the critical pieces you need are independent threads. But it seems as if in 2000, all the pieces have just been plunked down in place. I think the process is nearing takeoff."
   
   Larry Smarr was named director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in 1985. He had proposed the NCSA to the National Science Foundation in 1983 and has guided developments there including Telnet, a widely used text-based Internet program, and Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser. In 1997, he also was named director of the National Computational Science Alliance.

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