1012 Corridor

The term “10/12 Corridor” might mean something, someday, for the tech elite beyond Louisiana, perhaps whispered in the same breath as granddaddy Silicon Valley or the newbie Raleigh-Durham area. The oil industry is still a major employer in the Bayou State, so the idea of an I-10 and I-12 technological “hub” or “cluster” takes some getting used to.

Still, something interesting is happening along the way: Ever-growing pockets of technology-based academia and businesses along the corridor, particularly north of Lake Pontchartrain. As such, this increased emphasis on technological advances in other areas—from the proposed UNO Tech Park in Slidell to the SuperMike supercomputer at LSU to the LITE Center in Lafayette—could be evidence of the birth of another major Louisiana industry, in addition to King Oil.

“We saw that (oil bust) blow up on us once in the 1980s,” says former University of Delaware education professor John St. Julien, now a Lafayette resident and longtime proponent of the fiber-to-the-home project in that city. “We’re making sure that doesn’t happen again. We can’t rely on one industry, even though that industry has a good half-century to go, at least.”

Already, in another part of the state, the Baton Rouge Area Foundation and its marketing consultant, GSD&M Idea City out of Austin, has begun touting the corridor from Texas to Mississippi as a family-oriented hub, or cluster, that’s also an ideal place for the creative class to work and play. BRAF has invested $750,000 so far in an effort to promote the unique lifestyle of a state rife with festivals, church-going families and a joy of life.

Fifteen years ago, New Orleans used to drive the economic engine of the state, but it was highly concentrated on the service sector, which is one of the most vulnerable to a downturn or catastrophes, like hurricanes. It was also about 15 years ago that Gov. Mike Foster backed studies to eventually combine technological innovation within university settings. That move back in the mid-1990s was impetus for what we’re seeing now, St. Julien says.

Geographically, the 10/12 corridor is a 200-plus-mile, partially bisected highway running from Texas along I-10, through Lafayette and to LSU, and then on I-12 northeast of Baton Rouge to the Pontchartrain’s Northshore and I-10 south of Baton Rouge toward the lower end of the great lake to New Orleans. The two roadways meet up again just before entering Mississippi.

It’s a good stretch, much longer than Raleigh-Durham, for one example. That fledgling corridor only takes up only 60-miles of innovative Web and tech development. Students from University of North Carolina, NC State and even Duke contribute to the research hub.

But Raleigh-Durham is also an area of North Carolina that’s pretty much like Louisiana: southern, conservative, rural in most areas and generally affordable to techsters and their families.

It could be a propitious time for Louisiana to strive toward the Durham experiment, with its Triangle Research Park sandwiched between Durham and Raleigh. Venerable Silicon Valley recently placed a surprisingly dismal 12 out of 12 on the list of the best “technological corridors” in the country in a national survey that included quality of life as its basic postulate. Nice area, poll numbers noted, but $600,000-plus two-bedroom homes, high cost-of-living issues and traffic snarls pushed it way down the list.

First place on that list: The Raleigh-Durham area.

“Raleigh-Durham is a good model, a really good example for Louisiana. It’s something to shoot for,” St. Julien says. Forming a cohesive tech-hub would require teamwork and the sharing of knowledge and even technology, he says.

“We would have to get together and work as a community for a similar goal,” St. Julien, 56, says. “That’s how Raleigh-Durham did it. A couple of research universities got together with some of the local governments and started up this research triangle project. And part of what they did there is what happened here in Lafayette on the fiber project (to provide high-speed Internet, cable and phone services). It took a community coming together. We managed to do that here, which in my opinion was unusual.”

That project is going online this month, with all customers promised the option by 2011. A similar fiber-optic project in Ascension Parish began taking shape five years ago.

Another example of Lafayette teamwork occurred in the late 1990s when business and community leaders involved in the Lafayette Economic Development Authority and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette joined to build the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise. LITE is a state-funded $27 million complex on campus property across from the Cajundome that offers integrated data visualization, supercomputing installations and research-heavy collaborative environments for high-performance computer modeling, all powered by 3D immersive visualization systems. LITE, which opened in January 2006, is connected to LONI, the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative.

Sometimes, communication and the sharing of knowledge among universities or, certainly, private companies, can be an issue, St. Julien says. It’s true that telecommunication advances can eliminate such physical barriers as the bodies of water that separate Baton Rouge from Lafayette to the west and New Orleans to the southeast, but other barriers, the personal and intellectual rivalries, could even be harder to breach.

The I-12 corridor from Slidell to Baton Rouge already has a head start on its plans for a tech hub, says James Hartman, with the newly formed I-12 Alliance Technology Corridor. Hartman is the communications director for the St. Tammany Economic Development Foundation. Hartman, too, says that touting only oil runs counter to a solid, well-rounded economy.

“We’re seeing right now how tenuous it can be to rely on one industry,” Hartman says.

St. Tammany, one of five Florida Parishes on the Northshore, boomed after Hurricane Katrina. It’s higher and bigger (850 square miles) than New Orleans (250 square miles). St. Tammany and the other parishes are rife with land in which to grow. The alliance isn’t specifically about technology, but it is a goal, Hartman says. Its leaders are developing marketing materials to locate the type of industries that would be drawn to the area.

“I-12 is clean and techno-friendly with affordable housing, which is a big feature,” he says. Housing costs have gone up, though, since Southshore residents emigrated northward, where it’s high and dry. Chevron, for one, moved its 550 employees from New Orleans area to Covington, parish seat of St. Tammany. Farther east, in Slidell, the University of New Orleans is building its “Tech Park,” which will include some commercial development.

Already, real-estate agents and brokers are marketing the I-12 Slidell-to-Baton Rouge run as a so-called “urban” corridor, meaning technology could follow that strip or the I-10 corridor to the south.

“Almost simultaneously,” Hartman says, “we have the I-10 technology corridor going on. It’s very similar from Michoud, near New Orleans East—where rocket launchers and fuel tanks are built for the shuttles—to the Stennis Space Center in the Gulfport/Biloxi area. Stennis is just across the state line in Mississippi.”

Hartman points out that the UNO Tech Park is not yet under construction, but land has been cleared. That’s only a couple miles from the I-12 intersection, an area which offers a good education system and developing infrastructure, and large tracts of undeveloped land, a great draw for industrial and executive-type development.

With the economy tanking nationwide, Hartman says, “it’s all the more important to have a cutting-edge, diverse economy.”

Louisiana State University is still the flagship school in this tech-hub “Interstate 10-12 Corridor” equation. “You usually only have one (university leading) the others,” St. Julien, a longtime professor of education, says. “That’s just the way it is in academia.”

Its locale, Baton Rouge, is the state capital and where the power and money rest. EA Sports, just last summer, announced the opening of a quality-assurance testing facility in Baton Rouge. LSU is where the SuperMike “supercomputer” sits. It’s a tech marvel more powerful than 1,000 microprocessors and is a big part of the move toward dubbing Baton Rouge a “Digital City.”

Baton Rouge, in fact, was a large recipient of Gov. Foster’s “IT Initiative,” approved by the Louisiana Legislature in 1999. About $10 million of the $25 million plan went toward building LSU’s Center for Applied Information Technology and Learning (called LSU CAPITAL). That became CCT, or the Center for Computation and Technology, where the SuperMike first plugged in.

CCT interim leader Stephen Beck says gaming, the digital-video kind, is part of that plan and Baton Rouge as a Digital City. Beck, who also works as an LSU School of Music professor, is heading up the new AVATAR: Arts, Visualization, Advanced Technologies and Research.

“It’s designed to foster research and teaching in digital media,” Beck says. “By digital-media we mean everything from digital games, interactive digital-art and film. Our main focus is on video games, simulations and integrated visual art, both video and audio. Simulation would be like a flight simulator or simulations for robotic surgery.”

As the aphorism goes, “build it and they will come” — even if you’re not the one building it. “We’re not involved directly with building these systems,” Beck says. “Our interest is getting faculty here who are interested in those sorts of things. Video-game development is a major part of that.”

Companies such as Turbo Squid helped to draft the Louisiana Digital Media Act. The act provided financial incentives for outsiders in the industry to move to Louisiana and the I-10 and I-12 Corridor.

“Everything from X-Box and Wii and PlayStation—all of these platforms are really just high-performance computing,” Beck says.

As for AVATAR, it’s still new and part of the multi-disciplinary hiring initiative at LSU. “We certainly can’t rely on oil right now,” he says. “Universities are in the middle of budget cuts and the state is in financial difficulty because of the volatility of the cost of oil. We need to take care of our natural resources, but we really can’t rely on them as we did before.”

Baton Rouge Area Digitial Industries Consortium (BRADIC) is also pushing the digital-industry cluster. To that end, at least four gaming companies recently sprouted up in New Orleans proper, as property values there dropped after Katrina. Gaming is simply big business, Beck says.

“What we’re seeing is a combination of digital-media tax credits, film tax credits and entertainment tax credits luring companies that involve technology to the 10/12 corridor, which has made specific investments in the industry,” he says. “This will become a magnet for other digital-media companies.”

AVATAR and other digital innovations are preparing students to perhaps start their own company, a “never-ending cycle, but in a good way,” Beck says. Sharing is a key to build a nationally recognized 10-12 corridor, on par with Raleigh-Durham and the newer tech kid on the block: the Orlando region.

“There is technology in Lafayette, the LITE Center, and great programs at that university (UL at Lafayette) that could help support a digital industry in that region,” Beck says. “As well as in New Orleans—in all areas of that city. You’ve got to remember, the tax credits available are not centric to Baton Rouge and LSU. The tax credits apply to the entire state. So, yes, I can possibly see that happening, that melding of ideas and technology, in the next couple of years down this corridor.”