
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, October 16, 1994                   TAG: 9410170078
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

OUR VALLEYS WORK TO BE WIRELESS

In today's Horizon section, an installment from our Peril & Promise series looks at the technology-based businesses that are already in the Roanoke region and examines the potential for more.

RESEARCHERS at Virginia Tech and at technology-based businesses throughout the Roanoke region are making the discoveries and developing the products now that will change the way we live in the 21st century.

It is work that could translate into hundreds of jobs for the region's residents in the years ahead.

Teachers at Tech, one of the nation's premier research institutions, are nurturing highly skilled graduates in a wide range of scientific and technical fields. They say that many of those graduates would like to stay in the region, if only the jobs were here for them.

Several technology-based businesses in fields such as wireless communications, fiber-optics, and bio-technology already call the region home.

Roughly a dozen fiber-optics businesses are located in the region, which encompasses the Roanoke and New River valleys, giving it one of the largest concentrations of such businesses in the nation outside the San Jose, Calif., and Boston areas.

University researchers and companies involved in wireless communications, including cellular telephones and newer generations of technology, are promoting the region from Wytheville to Lynchburg as a "Wireless Valley," hoping the notion will catch on like "Silicon Valley" did with the personal computer industry.

Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology maintains a bio-technology center at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, but the Roanoke region has more businesses involved in producing products from bio-technology, such things as environmentally safe pesticides and medicines.

The challenge, then, for the region's leaders is to find ways to build on the solid base of techno-business already here by creating an environment that is friendly to the entrepreneurs who start new businesses, to businesses already here that want to expand, and to outsiders who have discovered the Roanoke region and want to make it their home.

by CNB