Maine heads in high-tech direction

BANGOR – Maine is still way behind other states when it comes to its technology-based economy, but recent research findings – combined with the newly created Office of Innovation – indicate the state has taken large steps to remedy that.

“We’re a little behind, but we’re catching up,” Office of Innovation Director Dr. Janet Yancey-Wrona said Wednesday. “It’s long-term and it’s slow, but we’re trending in the right direction.”

Yancey-Wrona said major findings in the “Maine Innovation Index for 2004,” a report commissioned by the Department of Economic and Community Development, shows Maine’s investments in research and development have jumped from $2 million in 1991 to more than $60 million in 2004.

The numbers are encouraging, Yancey-Wrona said, but Maine is still a long way from translating those numbers into jobs.

“It’s like a pipeline, and if the end is jobs, you can’t start filling it from the middle,” she said. “A lot of things have to happen at the same time.”

In 2000, of 492,000 Maine jobs, only 26,000 were in the high-tech industry, she said. The number represented a 9 percent increase over 1999, but because the Maine high-tech industry is still primarily in the research stage, it could be a while before the job opportunities really start to show, Yancey-Wrona said.

She also said one of the reasons Maine industries – like pulp and paper – decline is because they don’t innovate and therefore can’t stay competitive.

The research findings and the creation of the Office of Innovation are part of Gov. John Baldacci’s “creative economy” initiative. The governor appointed Yancey-Wrona, president of the Maine Technology Institute since 1999, to head up the new office, and she called the governor’s move “a good indication of where our economy is headed.”

“We are positioning Maine to be an aggressive player expanding the creative economy, ensuring the continued success of our natural resource-based industries and retaining and attracting young adults to Maine,” DECD Commissioner Jack Cashman said in a statement released this week.

Yancey-Wrona said she looks forward to developing an overall technology plan and hopes to have it ready by the time the governor starts looking at his budget. The more money Maine generates from state funding, the more it can leverage from federal sources.

She will make recommendations to Baldacci regarding a possible technology bond issue in 2005.

“We’re catching up to other states, but those states aren’t static,” she said. “There are ways to accelerate and people need to be stimulated.”