Texas Industry Snapshot

Technology

Advanced technology holds the key to much of Texas’ economic development. As the third largest state in the number of scientists and engineers, Texas cultivates on of the world’s most advanced research and technology regions in the world. Texas corporations, universities, and research institutions are at the forefront of technology development for the energy, electronics, telecommunications, and chemical industries.

Research and Development

Over $7 billion in research and development capital is invested in Texas each year. R&D money in Texas is allocated to a variety of disciplines including medicine, biology, life sciences, and engineering. In Texas $244.4 million, or 16 percent, of public higher education research dollars in 2000 was spent on engineering research. Engineering research is crucial to the continued growth of the high-tech sector.

Home to over 400 public research centers, the technology base of Texas reaches even the most remote areas of Texas’ 267,277 square miles (692,247 sq km). Texas is home to a number of the nation’s most famous research institutions.

San Antonio’s Southwest Research Institute, the nation’s third-largest independent non-profit applied research and development center, has been conducting research in materials science, computer and electronic technology, environmental sciences, nuclear waste analysis, and other areas since 1947. Founded in 1982, the Houston Advanced Research Center targets research and development in a variety of industries on a cooperative basis and promotes the efficient transfer of technology to the marketplace.

Medical research in Texas is among the finest in the world. The Texas Medical Center in Houston, headquarters to more than 40 health care organizations, is the world’s largest medical complex with more than 125,000 people passing through it daily. The Texas Medical Center houses the Baylor College of Medicine (one of the research sites for the national Human Genome Project), the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, which opened the Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases in 1994.

The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio has a diverse research agenda ranging from the Childhood Asthma Project to the Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in Basic Biology of Aging. The University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas has been contributing to bioscience technology for many years. Its General Clinical Research Center (founded in 1972), together with the Ischemic Heart Disease Center (founded in 1975), has published over 800 scientific articles and 1,900 papers on their research efforts. Recently, the University opened the $61 million Simmons Biomedical Research Center.

More that $1.6 billion was spent on research and development at Texas public universities in fiscal year 2000, placing Texas among the few states with such a commitment to the future. The State of Texas contributes to these efforts by funding the nation’s largest state-supported, peer-reviewed competitive grant programs. Created in 1987 by the Texas Legislature, the Advanced Research Program and the Advanced Technology Program are complementary statewide research programs administered by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

Technology Transfer and Commercialization

The NASA-funded 14-state Mid-Continent Technology Transfer Center is headquartered at the Texas A&M University System’s Texas Engineering Experiment Station, which provides federal laboratories and private industry a direct link between technology sources and recipients.

In order to assist start-up businesses developing technologies with strong commercial potential, Texas has four technology incubators in Austin, Bryan/College Station, Dallas and San Antonio. The Texas Research Park Foundation, which owns and operates the 1,236 acre Texas Research Park in San Antonio, works with scientists and engineers to identify research results with high commercial potential, encouraging new company formation and job creation. The Austin Technology Incubator (ATI) was honored in early 1994 as the outstanding organization of its kind at the National Business Incubation Association conference in New York. Sixty of the new businesses assisted by ATI have graduated, collectively creating more than 2,000 jobs in emerging technology industries.