Top Tech City: Minneapolis, MN

Minneapolitans may be known for their humility, but they are seriously proud of their city. If you come to town to find out what’s so high-tech about the place,
the mayor will pick you up in his gas-electric hybrid car and personally drive you around. (Well, he did it for me, anyway.) R.T. Rybak, the hyperkinetic, triathalon-running, cross-country-skiing, 49-year-old mayor of Minneapolis, drives his city-owned Toyota Prius, points out landmarks, and simultaneously gives me a historic overview.
The car is no self-righteous prop. Even as traffic congestion has increased
during Rybak’s tenure, Minneapolis has be- come one of the first cities in the nation to bring emissions down below the levels prescribed by the Kyoto Protocol. Vehicle emissions are still increasing, but greenhouse-gas emissions from other sources have been reduced 15 percent in the past decade, by making buildings, factories and streetlights more energy-efficient and by increasing recycling. Rybak is also encouraging more, and greener, mass transit. The city’s transit commission is testing hybrid buses that will cut emissions even further.


The mayor isn’t surprised that Minneapolis ranks so high in tech, just that someone finally noticed. “The city has undergone a series of rebirths,” he tells me as the car sits silently at a traffic light. Built next to the only waterfall
on the Mississippi River, Minneapolis has been a center of industry and technological innovation from its inception. General Mills was a milling company; 3M was in mining. Today 3M is a giant, one of the most diverse technology and
materials-science innovators around.


Rybak tells me that when the mills declined in the early 1900s, the city was forced to adapt to a service-based econ- omy, leaving it in much better shape than industrial centers like Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Detroit, which had to reinvent themselves in the 1980s. Minneapolis adapted to postindustrialism early, becoming a brain trust of the region. A 2004 University of Wisconsin study found Minneapolis to be America’s most literate city, and I find out later that its list of contributions to various branches of technology is rich: 3M introduced magnetic tape, Scotch tape and the Post-it note. The airplane black box, the Nerf football and even the proprietary
controlled-foam-extrusion process for creating “marbits”—the pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, blue diamonds and purple horseshoes found in Lucky Charms cereal—were developed here. Medtronic, now the world’s largest medical technology company, was started in a Minneapolis garage in 1949. The company’s founder, Earl Bakken, went on to invent the first transistorized cardiac pacemaker in 1957.


Indeed, some of the city’s most prominent advances are in life sciences and medicine. The formerly run-down Philips neighborhood, whose high crime rate had helped get the city dubbed “Murderapolis” during the crack epidemic of the 1990s, is being recast as a center of medical research and innovation. The neighborhood was cleaned up with a program of computerized crime-fighting. The location and type of every crime was statistically analyzed, with trouble spots identified and targeted for police attention. Today local residents are given training and employment opportunities in the new medical facilities. “The paradigm in the 1980s and ’90s was the Edge City,” Rybak says—“the faceless office parks built far out in the suburbs. That was overbuilt and unsustainable. We’re trying to pull it back, recognize the value in density, in a dynamic urban setting. Everything we need is right here.” As he sees it, returning to a compact core, with research labs, hospitals and universities in close proximity, provides fertile ground for high-tech innovation.


In a 1.5-mile corridor stretching from downtown, there are 19 medical institutions, 61 research and clinical labs, and 2,300 physicians. A government-funded small-business “incubator” promotes medical technology start-ups, uniting inventors and venture capital, while hospitals provide patients for clinical trials, and huge companies like Medtronic provide R&D. Minnesota has more than 500 med-tech companies, many of which are small and prize independent thinking.




I later visit a group of physical therapists at Abbott Northwestern Hospital who since 1995 have run a program called Advanced Rehabilitative Techno-
logies (ART) that makes use of virtual reality in patient rehabilitation. Sensors attached to patients’ muscles detect the tiniest movements and feed the data into a computer. This allows the patient to use biofeedback, in which, say, a stroke victim improves strength and coordination by using muscle movement to play a game on a video monitor.


I play computer pinball with sensors attached to my forearms: When I flex, the paddles bat the ball around on the screen. In another exercise, I stand in front of a blue screen trying to manipulate myself as a little soccer goalie on a monitor. These therapeutic solutions keep patients entertained as they perform the often-monotonous exercises involved in their recovery. At the same time, the sensors allow doctors to collect reams of data on their subjects’ response times, changes in muscle strength, and overall progress. It is one of the only such programs in the country. The therapists are also pioneering what they call teleclinics: Internet videoconferencing rehab sessions conducted with patients as far away as Samoa.