State aims to bolster tech field
NEW HAVEN — Connecticut Innovations, the state technology investment agency, has seen its portfolio of companies grow and the value of that collection rise over the past five years, the organization’s chairman said.
“CI is the key to our future,” Mike Cantor said Monday during a round table discussion featuring Gov. Ned Lamont and some of the state’s leading tech sector executives at The District, the state’s technology incubator for start-up companies. “The sort of cutting edge biotech and smart manufacturing that we have well with anywhere else in the country.”
But Lamont said he is not willing to rest on the achievements the state has made in the past.
“I need to know what works and what we need to do better,” he said.
Lamont said Connecticut was once a world leader in innovation.
“We had some great old companies with some great bones,” he said. “But we lost our way.”
Peter Londa, president of Tantalus Systems in Norwalk, said one way for Connecticut to build on the current level of innovation is to assure equal access to fiber optic, broadband internet in all areas of the state, not just in more heavily settled areas. And the best way to do that, Londa said is to get the state’s municipally owned electric utilities involved in building out that network.
Tantalus Systems works primarily with helping electric utilities develop smart electrical distribution networks.
“The state needs to do whatever it can to help these municipal electric utilities,” Londa said.
Several of the tech executives at the event said the Lamont administration needs to find innovative ways to keep young people who come to Connecticut to the state’s colleges and universities to stay here rather than move way.
Lamont said one way he’s looking to do that is to expand existing college debt loan forgiveness programs to provide total forgiveness of some types of college loans for young people who go to school here and agree to stay in Connecticut’s tech sector for a certain number of years.