Growing tech

The investment firm J.P. Morgan has an ad campaign which asserts that the glass is half full only if you’re busy filling it. It’s a moderately clever twist on the old half empty/half full conundrum, one that is particularly applicable to Maine’s efforts to build a high-tech industry.

Maine has its success stories in this fast-developing sector — Envisionet and BroadcastAmerica.com are two of the most familiar. The state should be proud that home-grown businesses such as these have been able to thrive here and grateful to the entrepreneurs that made it happen.

But Maine also has stories that, although not quite failures, serve as sobering reminders that businesses only grow in fertile fields. Peach Networks, which markets technologies for interactive TV services, and eSprocket, which plans to be an on-line clearinghouse for commercial and industrial machinery, both started in Maine and both will soon be moving to Boston. The reasons are the same — a shortage of technologically adept workers and difficulty in raising capital.

The first problem is universal; high-tech everywhere is scrounging for trained employees. Maine, however, is disadvantaged by starting out with a rather shallow talent pool.

Maine lawmakers and voters have done much in recent years to add depth. The new Community College Partnership is growing beyond expectations, enrollments are up in the Technical College and University Maine systems. Given improved access to higher education, Maine people will use it. The state’s recent investments in research and development will help create the critical mass of engineers and innovators high-tech requires.

The second, lack of access to capital, is a problem hardly unique to Maine, but it is a serious and persistent one. High-tech businesses here are doing better in this regard and the King administration has some good initiatives under way to help, but the fact remains that venture capitalists go to Silicon Valley, Seattle and Boston when they want to invest; they come to Maine when they want to vacation.

This is to a considerable degree, as all who’ve dealt with the issue will attest, an image problem. And that image was hardly improved by a legislative committee’s hasty dismissal of Gov. King’s proposal to equip all students from 7th grade and up with Internet-connected laptop computers.

If lawmakers had spent the last three weeks thoughtfully considering this proposal and concluded that there was a better way to improve educational equity and technological literacy, Maine would end up with a better way to improve those things. Instead, lawmakers dismissed the proposal before the governor’s ink was dry and spent the last three weeks wallowing in lame excuses and offensive presumptions: schools have leaky roofs, batteries would run out, big brother would pawn the laptop for drug money. The comment by one female Education Committee member that computers are a “male” thing must have caused old J.P. Morgan himself to reconsider even those vacation plans.

Maine’s high-tech glass probably is more half full than half-empty, but the filling must continue and it must be done with a steadier hand.