High-Tech Month

Georgia has a 'hot date' in October.

This October marks the 10th anniversary of High-Tech Month in Georgia, an effort to boost the state's technological industry base that started as little more than a daylong press conference and mushroomed into a month of celebration involving thousands of people and dozens of events.

"The whole idea behind High-Tech Month is to make people aware of the tremendous contribution that technology makes to the economy of Georgia," says Paparelli, president of the software firm BT Group and this year's chairman of Georgia High-Tech Month. "Obviously, we hope this awareness translates into more technology companies doing business here."

Georgia already compares well with other high-tech meccas such as North Carolina's Research Triangle and Silicon Valley in California, and that fact owes much to both High-Tech Month and Georgia Tech, a major sponsor of the event. During the '80s, Georgia's business-technology base amounted to just a handful of home-grown companies and corporate branches. But according to a Georgia Tech study commissioned by the Business and Technology Alliance (B&TA), an allied group of companies dedicated to boosting the state's high-tech stock, recent growth in the industry has been phenomenal.

Today, there are at least 1,600 Georgia companies fitting the 11 categories of high-tech enterprise, up more than 60 percent in just the past three years. They employ more than 140,000 people and generate some $15 billion for the state's economy. And the Atlanta area enjoys a partially serendipitous reputation as a telecommunications center: The high-capacity fiber optics cables that make many advanced telecommunications applications possible ended up following the path of least resistance, the railroad right-of-ways that converged to give birth to the city in the early and middle 19th century.

"We have the second largest installations and investments for AT&T, MCI and Sprint in the country," Paparelli says. "In terms of pure fiber cable running through our city, Atlanta is more of a communications capital than New York City. When you combine the communications contributions with more than 600 software establishments we've got around the state, we're well on our way to becoming a software-communications capital."

The Tech Connection

Despite the good fortune of being a communications hub, that category makes up only 11 percent of Georgia's technology base. Computer software, peripheral and component firms take the lion's share with 34 percent. All this growth owes much to economic development at Tech through the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) and other Institute organizations. Making that contribution known is an important factor in Georgia Tech's extensive involvement in High-Tech Month.

"This is an opportunity for Georgia Tech to make its services and its research more broadly known, understood and supported not only by the high-tech community, but by the community at large," says Thomas K. Hamall, Tech's director of University Partnerships. "If you look at the range of businesses that are represented within the Business and Technology Alliance, you'll find that a very significant number of those businesses were created, formed or managed by Georgia Tech graduates.

"Also, it provides us with an opportunity to make services like our Advanced Technology Development Center better known, and the program of the management and administration of technology out of the Ivan Allen College."

Tech's diverse participation in High-Tech Month includes an essay contest for middle- and high-school science students cosponsored by B&TA, the 2,200-member Georgia Science Teachers Association and SciTrek. Hamall says the aim of the contest, titled "Technology: 2010 A.D.," is to "build a pipeline" by encouraging students to investigate the importance of technology in their lives and possible technological education and career choices. "They're taking a look at [technological career tracks] based on where that field might be at the point when they might be entering it 15 years out," Hamall says. "So High-Tech Month is a two-way street. It's a way of our positioning what it is we do and how it is that we support high-tech industry in Georgia, as well as an opportunity to stimulate and encourage young people to consider and to enter careers in technology and the sciences."

Georgia Tech has a historical connection with High-Tech Month as well. B&TA emerged from an organization called the Advanced Technology Development Institute, an offshoot of the ATDC, which was created by people like Howard Morrison of NationsBank and former Gov. George Busbee.

"They recognized the need to build a network among the high-tech industries in Georgia and to use that network as a mechanism for better informing the public inside and outside of Georgia about the future of high technology in the state," Hamall says, adding that the story doesn't end here. "If we don't work the entire spectrum-- not only working with existing industries, but working with potential new industry as we're doing with ATDC-- and working with the small industries that are out there who are no longer incubating but who need help and nurturing-- like we're doing through the Economic Development Institute and its 18 field offices-- how are we going to be able to compete in a global economy in the year 2010?

"The next five to seven years, the next 15 to 20 years, the leaps are going to be quantum. It is hard to predict. One thing we know is whether that growth rate is 50 percent or 100 percent, Georgia Tech is going to be a key factor in it."