Source: Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune – Nick Holonyak Jr. invented the world’s first practical visible-light LED in Syracuse, New York, in 1962. The son of an Illinois coal miner, he earned three degrees at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and returned there as a professor. His invention now lights the world, and it created a global market worth more than $100 billion. Yet, almost none of that manufacturing happens in Illinois.
Three decades later, U. of I. undergraduate Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina wrote Mosaic — the first widely used graphical web browser — while working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Urbana. Andreessen then left for Mountain View, California, and helped start Netscape. Four years after that, Max Levchin, also a U. of I. graduate, followed him west and co-founded PayPal with Luke Nosek, who was also a fellow Illini. The co-founders of YouTube Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Bob Miner, and Tesla’s Martin Eberhard all attended U. of I. They took their talent, their ideas and the wealth they created somewhere else.
The pattern is unmistakable. For 60 years, Illinois has been extraordinary at producing the people and inventions that have built the modern technology economy, but we’ve been considerably less good at keeping them. The browser and online payments went to Mountain View. Electric cars went to Palo Alto, California. Cloud infrastructure went to San Francisco. Each time, the value was created here and captured somewhere else.
The Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park, or IQMP, is proof that we are done letting that happen.
