The INOV8 blog tracks the latest news and trends in technology and innovation throughout the world
Baton Rouge. Red Stick. Place where Hogs feast on tigers.
Call it what you will, but the Louisiana capital aims to become a high-tech research hub.
City leaders are trying to determine the best approach to realize that goal.
BRAC’s vision seeks $15 million in state money, spread over four years, to add land and infrastructure for a 187-acre research park. The park, paired with a new regional innovation organization, could carry out what Baton Rouge has attempted to complete for decades: a fully realized research hub that could generate the next Google, Microsoft or Dell, along with a host of firms that apply technology to solve problems along with federal research activity known for spawning successful startups.
The UA’s research park in Fayetteville has placed Northwest Arkansas on its way to such a realization. Companies like NanoMech are poised to become household names of the future. And Little Rock perhaps is a bit ahead of the Baton Rouge curve, having set in motion last summer plans to develop a biomedical research park.
The proposed Little Rock venture would serve the collaborative research between UALR, UAMS and Arkansas Children’s Hospital. While its scope would be more focused on biomedical research and its size scaled back to about 30 acres, its impact on the city could be great.
Greater Baton Rouge, after surging to almost 1 million residents in the aftermath of Katrina, has settled back down to a metro population of around 750,000, similar to Little Rock. The Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers-Bentonville chain in NWA is roughly half a million.
Little Rock and Fayetteville continue to be recognized for their appeal and favorable business environment. In 2009, Little Rock was recognized as having the 7th best metro economy with the second-best overall growth by the Brooking Institution, and was named 22nd out of 361 metros by Forbes for best places to do business.
Fayetteville has been mentioned in so many “best of” lists — best place to live, best place for businesses and careers, best cities to work, live and play, best college sports towns — that it’s almost not newsworthy when it makes a new list.
While considered the “petrochemical center of the American South,” its port the ninth largest in the country in terms of tonnage shipped, Baton Rouge has nothing aesthetically or otherwise on Little Rock or Northwest Arkansas. And that’s not to say INOV8 doesn’t appreciate red beans or canopies of mossy oak.
It’s just to say that if Baton Rouge can aspire to become a research hub, spawning the next Google or Dell, then the sky should be the limit for NWA and Little Rock.
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