Atlanta has the brains, needs the bucks

Our universities are first-rate but lag behind the leaders in marketing.

Print
E-mail

By Richard Halicks

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In Norcross, a 3-year-old company runs three production lines 24 hours a day, cranking out the future of Atlanta.

Phil Skinner, pskinner@ajc.com Rama Amara, Kathryn Folkner and Suefen Kwa work on the LSRII Flow Cytometer that counts the number of immune cells in a sample and determines which ones can kill the virus at the Emory Vaccine Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Decatur. The center has recently received a federal grant to work on a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. For all the brainpower at Emory and Georgia Tech, Atlanta doesn’t function at the level of San Jose or Boston when it comes to being a technology hub.

More Atlanta area news »

The company, known as Suniva, employs 200 people making solar cells. It was born largely in the mind of a Georgia Tech scientist who is seeking the holy grail of solar power: high-efficiency cells made at low cost. And it is an example of the sort of business that will be essential to the success of American cities in the future: high-tech manufacturing that feeds a growing market.

Suniva followed a path – from brain to market – blazed by such schools as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose researchers create hundreds of companies a year, and Stanford University, whose imprint on Silicon Valley is clear. Can Georgia Tech and Emory University do what MIT and Stanford have done?

The short answer is, yes, Atlanta can play in the same league as Boston and San Jose.

But it doesn’t. At least not yet.

“You look at the actual social structure of this city and see that we have a huge amount of fragmentation: Companies and industries are just not connected to each other,” says Dan Breznitz, a Georgia Tech professor who studies innovation and economic development.

Throughout this week, the AJC publishes an eight-part series on metro Atlanta's 2012 turning point. Get the in-depth story on how our region ranks with nine of its metro competitors around the country. Find out who’s in the lead (it isn’t us) and why. It’s a story you’ll get only by picking up a copy of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution or logging on to the paper’s iPad app. Subscribe today.

Click here for more information about the Atlanta Forward series.

Follow our scorecards and see how Atlanta stacks up against our competition.

Watch extra footage from the WSB roundtable of Atlanta leaders.