The Pittsburgh Technology Council handed out its annual awards last week, honoring winners BLF Global, Universal Electric, Ansys, Bright Innovation, Vivisimo, Net Health Systems, Bossa Nova and Guru.com. (See the details in this weeks Pop City ). And Tech Council president Audrey Russo says the Pittsburgh trade group–the largest of its kind in the United States–is seeing local standouts carving different niches than those that won in past years.
BLP Global is a smart grid company–emerging clean tech, she notes. We definitely have not seen that in the past. The aggregation of the green piece is new. Were rethinking what we do in energy. Russo points to the creation of a new award category won by Bright Innovations this year: art and innovation. Its really an area not to be underestimated, she notes. Of Vivisimo, a search technology company, Russo notes that the field has moved quickly beyond mere product rankings into more sophisticated methods of organizing and optimizing searches.
With 1,400 member companies, the 25-year old Council is the largest in the United States. It supports firms in four general categories–advanced manufacturing/materials, green technology, information technology and life sciences–with business development, talent retention, government relations, and visibility services. Its twice the size of the Philadelphia-based Eastern Technology Council, founded two decades ago. Russo thinks that the Pittsburgh regions density has helped it flourish.
Theres easy access–it’s a series of hamlets. As a result, were working at trying to solve hard problems, she says. Pittsburgh’s biotech boom, she says, is an outgrowth of its growing major medical center, UPMC, and she credits major corporations like Westinghouse and Respironics for spurring the development of other new companies.
Other regions focus on a particular technology or hardware. Here, there are opportunities for a lot of strange bedfellows to collaborate, she noted.
Source: Audrey Russo, Pittsburgh Technology Council
Writer: Chris OToole