"Regional Economies as Knowledge Environments"

A pilot, not-for-profit consultancy that is passionate about future opportunities for collaboration, cooperation, and coordination among residents along the 270 Technology Corridor.

"270Tech has been creating opportunities, since 1999, for businesses to accelerate sustainable growth via interactions with local peers. Our goal is to assist judicious and industrious adoption of new tools, ideas, and practices in any and all regional 'Knowledge Environments'."

  Through 270Tech's network, ~5,000 direct and indirect contacts and colleagues share experiences, resources, and talent, and along the way enrich the perspectives of scientists, entrepreneurs, businesspeople, and investors in ways that strengthen the local economy as well as their businesses. Those old processes for building strong businesses, communities, environments, cultures or economies are now often referred to as techniques used by "Knowledge Environments".

270Tech's network includes innovators in science, technology, business, and early stage enterprises. These entrepreneurs provide insights and ideas that drive new business opportunities. Individuals interested broadening their field of vision or in adopting new practices or technologies benefit from participation.

* Support public OpenSource Business Forums (over 160 to-date) promoting exchanges
      concerning:      IT, BioTech, Md Markets, and Bio/Health Markets
* Offer in-house forum and training services to enrich employee skills.
* Support programs that train workers in key technical and business skills
* Support initiatives to help assimilate students and knowledge workers into the economy
* Identify and promote, with partners, key projects that will strengthen the local economy
* Promote initiatives that encourage more seed stage funding from local communities
* Personalized consultation & matchmaking between organizations that must interact.
* A model that fosters knowledge sharing and cooperation to create new services.
* Building a powerful solution network encouraging and promoting all enterprises
      along the Maryland I-270 Technology Corridor.

      We focus primarily within the "270 Corridor" to integrate participants in the local economy, regardless of company size or industry segment. We strive to increase interactions between businesses and with public services, and to help assimilate students into the economy via increased exposure to economic activities. We hold that no technology, business process or research initiative is more important than the market it serves.

    270Tech combines multiple perspectives to provide cross-industry networking and Data Model opportunities, facilitate inter-industry dialogues, stimulate alliance partnering, and act as a clearinghouse for business advice and matchmaking.

    The 270Tech pilot is a non-partisan, neutral integrator of knowledge environments, providing a common, non-threatening platform where participants in the 270 economy can exchange views and work to integrate goals and efforts.

    Though keeping a global perspective, the 270Tech chapter pilot maintains the local focus of a village marketplace. Our goal is to quietly offer forums that provide substance without irrational pressures, promises or hype.


BACKGROUND: Our experience as scientists and in business has convinced us that all business people share a universal need, namely deeper familiarity with how useful technology is created, adopted and utilized in our democratic economy. Our experience as educators has convinced us of the fundamental need to assimilate students into the economy. Finally, we hypothesize that most every social requirement requiring an efficient, enduring solution is deserving of a private enterprise model. We have developed the 270Tech pilot to test that hypothesis.


METHODS:
* 270Tech hosts frequent, small, local forums with substance, that provide a neutral, open platform where businesspeople, public servants and students may all interact and gain useful perspectives on and insights into the regional economy, via peer-to-peer education.

* 270Tech provides monthly or bi-monthly workshops that address, in further detail, selected significant issues identified in the grassroots forums.

* 270Tech helps partners organize regional symposia that provide deeper and more extensive exposure to ongoing issues and projects of importance for the local economy.

* 270Tech produces an email newsletter providing local businesses, agencies, and schools an additional outlet for press releases and business-related notices.

* 270Tech identifies projects of regional scope that address significant regional economic needs with private enterprise solutions, and will endeavor, with partners, to carry those projects to fruition in a manner that extends the greatest benefit to all regional citizens.



    Incorporated in Maryland (August 1999), the company is headquartered in Dickerson, Md.
Management:   Roger G. Erickson, Ph.D.,  President/Founder.



WHERE: We meet in the headquarters of forward thinking local institutions. This virtual network brings productive people together in informal settings to collaborate on pressing business, technical, regulatory, and social tasks.



Dr. Erickson was a Sr. Staff Fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health, studying neurological correlates of complex primate behaviors. He was a fellow in Germany of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in Brain & Behavioral Sciences at MIT, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Neurobiology at Yale Medical School.  His education includes a BA-Biology, Reed College, Oregon, and a PhD-Physiology, SUNY/Buffalo. 
..At the NIMH his participation in NIH and AAAS education outreach programs launched an interest in Bio/Medical and economic supply chains (Knowledge Environments) larger than just his tiny corner of the primate nervous system.