Governor Pitches Utah as Home for Tech Companies

From an ornate ballroom inside the turn-of-the-century governor’s mansion here, the serious business of the Olympics is being conducted: the business of selling Utah.

At a series of high-powered seminars, Gov. Mike Leavitt is busy pitching Utah as a haven for biomedical research and digital technology, offering hard-to-come-by Olympic tickets to gain an audience with venture capitalists and high-tech entrepreneurs.

“We have a very clear message for them,” Leavitt said of the hundreds of financiers and Silicon Valley executives that he’s invited to attend the breakfast sessions.

The spirited meetings are conducted by leaders from the academic, business and political worlds and include five Cabinet members, the dean of Harvard Business School and former U.S. Rep. Jack Kemp of New York. The topics are wide-ranging, but the agenda is clear: Come do business in Utah.

“We are by most measures considered one of the top 10 technology markets. We haven’t had the exposure we need,” Leavitt said, calling his effort to attract business leaders “full-gear schmooze.”

It’s not the hard sell some would expect. The state has nine public colleges and four private universities, providing a highly educated, tech-savvy work force. Utah is ranked sixth among all states for its ability to adapt to the high-tech new economy, according to a study released last year by the Washington-based Progressive Policy Institute.

Utah’s public schools are among the most wired, with 92% connected to the Internet, 10 percentage points higher than the national average, according to a national marketing study conducted last year. Nearly 70% of Utah households have a computer, and in 2000 Dun & Bradstreet ranked Salt Lake City as the nation’s No. 3 “high-tech hot spot.”

“The work force here is educated and computer literate,” said Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, an online liquidator based in Salt Lake City. He noted that Brigham Young University and the University of Utah established computer science departments 20 years ago and have nationally recognized research arms.

“I have no problem finding computer-literate employees,” he said.

Connecting With High-Tech Industry

Byrne attended a recent seminar led by Kim Clark, dean of the Harvard Business School, which featured a lively discussion of the digital economy and the thorny world of genetic mapping. Clark paced in front of a white board bearing the state’s slogan for Leavitt’s high-tech initiative: “Utah, Where Ideas Connect.”

Leavitt, a 51-year-old Republican, is a tireless campaigner for his state’s position in the high-tech world. His seminars, gathering investors to mix business with pleasure, appear to be having some impact.

“I’ve been impressed with how progressive people are,” said Bruce McCaw, Seattle-based venture capitalist and CEO of Pistol Creek Financial. McCaw said he came for the seminars, and attending Olympic events was secondary. “You can see how this is an environment where you can get things done. Business leaders like places where they can get things done.”

Utah offers tax and other incentives to lure businesses, but the state prefers to brag about its existing high-tech companies and infrastructure. Among companies with offices here are Iomega Corp., manufacturers of Zip drives and portable storage devices for computers, and Intel, which has a large research and development campus here.

“We’re trying to get the word out,” Leavitt said. “We have one of the largest cancer research centers here, we are the leaders in gene mapping, there may be two or three places in the world that manufacture more medical devices than we do. We don’t want to be a place of the past, we want to be a place of the future, that’s why we’re in biotech and new technologies.”

Attracting money and companies to Utah is also not the chore it used to be. The Olympics have not just opened a window to the state’s natural wonders, but also prompted the state to embark on a crash program to upgrade its infrastructure. The airport, highways and public transportation have all been expanded and modernized in the last two years.

Those are among the reasons Bruce Witte, the CEO of the international printing company AlphaGraphics, moved his headquarters here last year.

“I think Salt Lake is an undiscovered gem,” Witte said. “Everybody likes to think they are ahead of the curve--I am ahead of the curve by relocating here. I tell every executive I know about Salt Lake and they don’t believe me. They’ll learn. In my view, Salt Lake is the No. 1 city to do business in in the United States.”

Grand Ideas, Little Investment

Some say, however, that Leavitt’s enthusiasm for the initiative is not backed by the financial muscle necessary to do the job.

“The governor is working relatively hard on attracting high-tech business, but the state is investing relatively small amounts of money in the effort,” said R. Thayne Robson, director of the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Utah. He is also on the governor’s board of economic advisors.

“I applaud the governor’s program. What he’s trying to accomplish is great, but the money isn’t behind it,” Robson said. “Neighboring states are spending more to attract that kind of business and offering them more in the way of tax breaks and subsidies.”