THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, December 18, 1995 TAG: 9512160171
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Ted Evanoff
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
Tidewater never was known as a town full of investors willing to risk their cash on new ventures. For that matter, it was barely known for promising start-up companies, the kind celebrated for fast growth and good jobs.
While venture capital and canny entrepreneurs have been scarce, what has filled the town have been engineers and technicians. Thousands of them.
And the way the thinking went, if Tidewater could come up with the idea, and find venture capital to back the idea, you'd put droves of those engineers and technicians to work in the civilian world.
Well, the way Joe Heyman tells it, Tidewater's future goes beyond being a federal town reliant on government spending.
While the space race prowess of Tidewater scientists and engineers naturally shapes his thinking - Heyman is a physicist employed at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton - he doesn't sound outlandish when he talks about the future.
In fact, as the region tries to find its way in an era of diminished federal spending, he describes one of the clearest visions you'll ever hear concerning the economy of Hampton Roads.
Heyman, deputy director for technology applications at NASA Langley, has a simple idea. He says Tidewater can find a niche for itself as the Measurement Valley of America.
The name lacks the familiar ring of Silicon Valley, the home of the computer industry near San Francisco, or the Research Triangle near Raleigh, but the idea of measurement has the virtue of accuracy.
``If you look at some of the companies that are interested in moving here, they are in the measurement industry,'' Heyman said.
Gateway 2000 is building a personal computer assembly plant in Newport News. Less than two hours west on Interstate 64, Motorola is building a $3 billion semiconductor chip manufacturing plant outside Richmond.
IBM and Toshiba are putting in a chip plant at Manassas. Virginia apparently is in the running for a third chip plant to be operated by Motorola and Siemens.
No, computers and chips are not part of the measurement industry. But the computer scientists need tools able to measure quality in minute detail.
And that's where Heyman comes in. NASA Langley has loads of tools on the shelf.
When the space shuttle lifts off from Cape Canaveral, for example, a cryogenic pump draws a combustible mixture of hydrogen and oxygen into the rocket engine.
Inside the pump are ceramic ball bearings. NASA Langley developed an electron microscope expressly for use in the manufacturing stage of the ball bearings to scan for defects below the surface.
A smart entrepreneur armed with NASA's scanning acoustic electron microscope can develop a small industry measuring the quality of the chips in the Motorola plant, or key parts of the computers made in Gateway's factory. In fact, NASA officials happily would sell the technology.
``We're moving from a time period when we had the Cold War as the driving engine that formed the big picture for us,'' Heyman said. ``We're moving to a driving force that I believe will be economic competition. Maybe environmental. The time system we're in now is chaos.''
Squeezed by the federal scale back, NASA Langley has shopped its wonders to would-be buyers.
NASA Langley's home page on the Internet lists nearly 200 technologies, including scientific papers and possible commercial applications.
The agency has signed about 140 memoranda of understanding, which will provide companies with access to the ingenuity of the federal engineers and scientists.
A large amount of the technology licensed by NASA Langley has flowed out of Virginia. But some has stayed put, enough to assure Heyman there someday could be a Measurement Valley in Hampton Roads.
It'll take venture capital to help seed the new enterprises in the region. And it'll take a regional marketing campaign aimed at luring the technology buyers outside Virginia to open branches in Tidewater.
``We have three or four licenses or licenses pending with companies in Hampton Roads and some of the companies we are working with are thinking of moving to Virginia,'' Heyman said.
``Two companies off the top of my head are negotiating with the cities. I won't tell you which cities. I'm a big fan of regionalism. If it's a company that locates in Williamsburg or Hampton, it's good for all of Hampton Roads.''
KEYWORDS: ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT by CNB