(KCPW News) Salt Lake City is gaining national recognition for its achievements in the tech industry. Forbes has rated Utah’s capital city fifth in the country for high tech growth based on long and short-term job numbers. Troy D’Ambrosio, Director of the University of Utah’s Lassonde Entrepreneur Center, says the ranking is not a surprise.
“We’ve had a very active and vibrant startup community here in the last five to six years, and there has been a lot of new companies come out to the University of Utah and a lot of new companies start up organically here, as well as tech jobs move from the bay area and places here,” he says.
D’Ambrosio says the city would have not been able to achieve this level of tech growth without collaboration between the state’s universities, the Utah Science Technology and Research Initiative and the business community.
“The University of Utah has gone from very average on commercializing technologies to being the last two years the first in the country in starting up companies based on university technology,” he says. “I think the embracing of investing in the research universities by the state of Utah several years ago in the USTAR initiative, which was driven by the business community, was a very important milestone.”
Seattle, Baltimore, Columbus, Ohio, and Raleigh, North Carolina took the top four spots in the ranking.
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