Louisiana Department of Economic Development announced Robert Fudickar will be the technology industry director for the state agency.

The year-long battle between Lafayette Utilities System (LUS) and competitors BellSouth Louisiana and Cox Communications over the utility company's proposed Fiber for the Future project came to an end last month when voters approved the $125 million fiber optics plan by a vote of 62 percent to 38 percent.

A community essentially has two options for strategies to diversify its economic base: traditional economic development or technology-based economic development (TBED). The traditional approach of recruiting or inducing companies to relocate to their community from elsewhere creates an atmosphere of competition, rivalry and one-upmanship among cities and regions as they bid to buy firms' location decisions. Often, it is also difficult for small and mid-sized communities to compete on these terms.

Pauli Jacobi, director of the Louisiana State University System Research and Technology Foundation, is resigning her position but will remain an LSU employee.

Robert Chernow was appointed to the newly created position of vice provost for entrepreneurship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

With hopes of creating a geographic concentration of academic and private bioscience research and commercialization, the Louisiana legislature ended its 2005 session with passage of a bill creating a new development authority.

New York's lead agency for promoting tech-based economic development (TBED) in the state soon will have a new name, if not a complete makeover. Under enacted budget legislation, the New York Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research (NYSTAR) will become the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation by Jan. 1, 2006.

Louisiana State University's Business and Technology Center (LBTC) recently received the National Business Incubation Association's (NBIA) 2005 Randall M. Whaley Incubator of the Year award, recognizing overall excellence in business incubation programs. The award is NBIA's most prestigious honor, presented as a tribute to NBIA's first chairman.

New York's Empire Zones Program dodged a veto from Gov. George Pataki as an agreement was met with the legislature to restructure the program. The state budget, signed into law last week, extends the program and allows for an additional 12 zones to be created throughout the state.

Sylvia Goldman has resigned as director of the Louisiana Department of Economic Development, effective at the end of March.

Craig Watters is serving as interim director of the Falcone Center for Entrepreneurship at Syracuse University. Past director Nola Miyasaki has relocated to Hawaii to join a biotech company.

George "Mick" Stadler is the new CEO for the incubator at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Michael Tentnowski is the new director of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Incubator.

Policymakers and practitioners continually seek new ideas to integrate into their overall TBED strategies in order to capitalize on innovative approaches and remain a competitive force in the global marketplace. Over the last few months, two new concepts in TBED aimed at supporting higher education have surfaced in New York and Wisconsin with two distinct goals: achieving the status of a world-renowned research capital and increasing college graduates to raise per capita income.

 

Jeffrey Boyce was named the assistant vice president of the Research Foundation of the State University of New York. Boyce had been the deputy commissioner for manufacturing services at Empire State Development.