Can Carnegie Mellon and Pitt Forge Tech Transfer Into Tech Transformation?
Pittsburgh’s got a problem. You might not know it to see the city. It’s a compact grouping of attractive buildings sitting on a point of land triangulated by the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. Gone are the soot-belching plants and in their place the rivers’ edges are graced with shops, restaurants and parks. Pittsburgh has spent the last few decades shedding an ugly, steel-town image for one slightly more refined and more successful. Pittsburghers are still fanatical about their sports teams, but the average citizen can also rattle off the names of a few of the technology companies in the region: FORE Systems, Ansoft Corp., Janus Technologies, the Carnegie Group. And while you might not call it a technology center, there is the same proportion of technology jobs (6 percent) in the greater Pittsburgh area as there is in the greater Boston area. In an effort to change its profile, Pittsburgh is leaning heavily on its high-profile, higher education universities: Carnegie Mellon and the
