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

DATE: THURSDAY, August 31, 1995                   TAG: 9508310050
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

HATCHING HI-TECH BUSINESSES

It's a history to be proud of, to be sure. But the city and this region have a diversified economy, and are gradually developing not just as a hub for transportation and distribution, but also as a locus for a few high-technology manufacturing and innovation clusters, particularly wireless communications and fiber optics.

According to a survey by CorpTech, an information company in Woburn, Mass., this area already ranks 14th nationally in telecommunications jobs. Wow.

Now this up-to-date view of our changing niche has helped win the financial backing of Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology to launch a small-business incubator here.

Said CIT President Robert Templin this week in announcing a $200,000 contribution to the incubator project: ``Roanoke has the potential of being a global technology hot spot.''

Can you believe it? We haven't been much of a hot spot for anything in recent decades. It's plum exciting to imagine that Big Lick, with considerable help from a big university in Blacksburg, might one day become a boom town all over again - this time for hi-tech entrepreneurs.

It could happen. Whether it does will depend mostly on the region's ability to grow and attract knowledge-economy workers and the capital to invest in their ideas and deals. This is mostly free-market stuff. But the presence of a major research university is crucial, and the public sector can help in other ways as well.

One way is to ensure a solid infrastructure is in place to support the development and nurturing of small-business start-ups. That's the idea behind the incubator concept - essentially a facility where start-up companies can share office and management services and a support system of experienced advisers.

This is a complicated concept - with less than certain promise. One might well wonder why, for example, if business incubators are such a good idea, private entrepreneurs haven't yet offered them to make a profit. One might also argue that the public sector is not a good judge of business prospects, and that publicly supported incubators are unfair to competing businesses that don't enjoy incubator support.

These are strong points in theory. It is clear, at the least, that the success of any companies - inside or outside incubators - will depend on market forces. (Unless, of course, they're defense contractors.)

In practice, though, a little public support can be helpful and appropriate - as helpful as a nearby university, as appropriate as road access. The CIT promises to help Roanoke's incubator tenants draw on the expertise of 13 technology-development centers at state universities and at five CIT-affiliated federal laboratories. Some 50 start-up companies have expressed an interest in entering an incubator here.

With the CIT contribution in hand, it appears the project pushed by the city and the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce could be off the drawing board and open for business as early as next spring. Assuming it's handled well, that's good news for this old railroad town.