Top Tech City: Minneapolis, MN

After showing me the 19th-century mills by the river, now being retrofitted as
luxury condos and pricey offices for tech companies, Mayor Rybak drops me
off at the Green Institute, a nonprofit that promotes environmental tech-
nology and sustainable energy use—another area in which Minneapolis scored high points, with its eight EPA-rated EnergyStar buildings. The institute’s building is a textbook on green technologies. It has no furnace but is kept at a constant temperature by a nontoxic antifreeze (so green you could actually drink it) circulating through a series of geothermal wells dug into the bedrock below. Mirrors above skylights follow the sun to reflect it inside, and sensors lower all electric light correspondingly, hibernating when people leave the room. Reused steel forms the bulk of the support beams, and the building has an insulating living roof planted with Minnesota prairie species. The electrical system, run partly from an array of solar panels on the roof, kicks power back to the grid when it overproduces. Shelving consists of pressure-treated boards of soy and newspaper that look just like shiny black marble.


Michael Krause, the institute’s director, tells me that they’ve incorporated more than 200 green-technology elements into the construction. The idea is for the building to serve as an example and proving ground for green tech on a larger, more complex scale. Rybak says that the city hopes to build a new baseball stadium for the Twins, with a
“biomass” heating system—an energy-
efficient trash incinerator.


I take the slick new light rail back downtown (its automated ticket machine speaks Spanish, Hmong and Somali, in addition to English), but I’m flummoxed by the routes of the bus system. So I take a cab (the drivers all listen to National Public Radio) out to the University of Minnesota to meet with mathematician Andrew Odlyzko, head of the school’s Digital Technology Center. In what is emerging as a theme of the city’s innovative mindset, he holds forth on the value of interdisciplinary research and cooperation: between industry and the university and between engineering and computer science. The clustering of disciplines encourages interesting avenues of exploration. Odlyzko is researching the history of railroads’ psychological effects in the 19th century, teasing out the parallels with the spread of the Internet, our own century’s “disruptive technology.”



The university is home to quite a
roster of innovative thinkers, which has earned it a reputation as an invention
factory and a ranking as one of the top three public research universities in the country. Seymour Cray, father of the supercomputer, and several of the Nobel-winning creators of the transistor (arguably the most important invention of the 20th century) studied here. Today, in the same library where Cray crammed as an undergraduate, an astrophysicist uses the spare processing time of hundreds
of networked computers in the student PC lab to construct two-terabyte 3-D
animations of the internal combustion
of stars. The Center for Distributed Robotics has developed a soda-can-size spy robot that can be shot from a grenade launcher, which could have practical applications in urban warfare. And the university recently won a contract from the Department of Homeland Security to design a smart video-monitoring system that would call attention to suspicious situations, such as abandoned packages left on railway platforms.


In another lab, I stumble around in a virtual-reality helmet, running into real walls as I navigate a digitized room. As my bruised shins attest, the era of the functional Holodeck has not yet arrived. A “Web usability lab” has a computer station at which the patterns of a user’s Web navigation are monitored through a one-way mirror; the data collected will be used to facilitate more efficient Web page designs. Odlyzko appreciates the synergy he’s witnessing (such as the recent biotech-focused research partnership between the university and the Mayo Clinic in nearby Rochester) but still feels that venture capital for tech start-ups is disproportionately allocated to Silicon Valley and Route 128 in Boston. Minneapolis, out in a sea of corn and soybeans, has not yet been given its proper recognition as a tech capital.