Book touts move from industry to innovation

Antoine van Agtmael speaks at the Brookings Institution last week about the new book

  Washington

Albany, in the forefront of nanotechnology research, is one of the fastest-growing cities for tech jobs, according to a new book exploring hot spots of innovation across the globe."You have GlobalFoundries, which has thousands of employees working in one of the most modern plants in the world," says Antoine van Agtmael, the Dutch-born investor who wrote "The Smartest Places on Earth: Why Rustbelts Are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation" with Dutch journalist Fred Bakker.

Their book, mentioned in a Brookings Institution panel discussion last week, lists Albany as a leading innovation hub — part of an emerging "brainbelt" in the United States.

"New York is proud to be home to some of the most sophisticated computer chip research on the planet, and with thousands of scientists and engineers, from Albany to Buffalo, we are growing the industry like never before," Gov. Andrew Cuomo said last year. "These strategic investments in nanotechnology, as well as replicating the success in Albany across upstate, have attracted global leaders like Nikon that are bringing private funding and job opportunities to New York."

In February, SUNY Poly and GlobalFoundries, a California computer chip manufacturing firm that employs 3,000 at a factory in Saratoga County, announced a new $500 million program to generate more than 100 jobs developing next generation chip manufacturing technologies.

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By Xiumei Dong, Medill News Service

Published 10:40 pm , Sunday, April 10, 2016