Word: austin
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...Start-up Nation Twenty miles south of Austin, in a nondescript industrial park, sits a bland, corrugated-metal building with a roll-up door. Inside the building sits the future of the U.S. economy...
...Austin provides a useful lesson in how to stay on top of the innovation game. Start with an educated population (43% of Austin residents have a bachelor's degree or higher), mix in a robust venture-capital scene (one of the best outside Silicon Valley), add a supportive community of peers (groups like Bootstrap Austin band together hundreds of entrepreneurs) and wrap all that up with a state government unafraid to throw money at companies that need a little help getting off the ground...
...Over at the University of Texas, the nonprofit Austin Technology Incubator houses fledgling firms, plying them with business-plan advice, contact with financiers and lots of coffee over which to share ideas and solve problems. The incubator's 20-year record: more than 200 companies and thousands of jobs created. "Companies don't start unless they're resourced," says Rob Neville, who launched one company with the help of the incubator and is now scaling up another, Savara Pharmaceuticals, in anticipation of support from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund...
...that matters, stop by Ringdale, a company in the northern Austin suburb of Georgetown. One of Ringdale's main business lines used to be security systems, but as the construction of new buildings has remained depressed, so have sales of things like the ID-card readers that go inside them. Ringdale's response: throw more resources, including employees, at its burgeoning line of light-emitting-diode products, for which it holds a number of patent applications, thereby answering increased demand for low-energy commercial lighting. "We've redeployed," says CEO Klaus Bollmann, whose firm will open one plant expansion...
...Rewiring the Workforce In northwest Austin, in cubicles packed with toys and rock-band posters, people in T-shirts and jeans are hard at work creating a video game that someday will be played online by thousands of people at a time. It takes years to produce such a complex game, representing a major investment for California-based Electronic Arts. Why is this happening in Austin? Simple. "The talent pool is here," says local BioWare studio co-head Gordon Walton...