The search for tomorrow.

• Author: Bailey, David
• Position: Proposed research park - Includes related article

Tune in today to see whether technology will boost the Triad's ratings.

In November, a story stripped across the front page of the Winston-Salem Journal heralded the first step in a bold plan to create the Piedmont Triad Technology Campus. A later story predicted that companies would move to the region "to piggyback on local academic research" once the Triad had its own version of Research Triangle Park.

"My personal judgment is that it's going to happen," an enthusiastic Dr. Richard Janeway, dean of Wake Forest University's Bowman Gray School of Medicine, told the newspaper. The trick was getting local companies to come up with a half-million dollars to extend an option on 1,000 acres. This prime real estate -- almost equidistant from Winston-Salem, Greensboro and High Point -- would finally create a Triad you could point to, with Interstate 40 its Main Street.

"If we let this opportunity slip by, shame on us," said John W. Davis III, a partner with Alex. Brown & Sons in Winston-Salem.

That was then. In December, the Triad was singing a different song. "You can't do a research park until you have the academic infrastructure in place to support it," noted Fred Nordenholz, president of the Greater Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce.

"There's no clear plan to make this a research park right now," Davis said around Christmas. "We've got a heck of a piece of property in the middle of the Triad that could serve as a focal point and create jobs and be an industrial park or an office park."

Admittedly, this may sound like Triad boosters are grasping for straws in a whirlwind generated by their own hot air. But they say don't worry. Forget for a moment the property. The option expired in January without supporters coming up with the money, anyway. Forget the research park. What is significant -- if not singular -- is the amount of enthusiasm and cooperation being generated by ideas that have the Triad as their centerpiece.

"There is a real excitement there," says Phil Carson, an Asheville lawyer who heads a UNC Board of Governors' committee charged with evaluating three proposals -- all for programs to educate engineers in the Triad. Many see graduate engineering as the catalyst that will start a chain reaction of research and high-tech initiatives.

Not only is there excitement. There's commitment, indicated by how many heavyweights took a day off to tell Carson's committee they were behind graduate engineering: James Johnston, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.'s chairman and chief executive; John Medlin Jr., Wachovia Corp.'s chairman and CEO; U.S. Rep. Steve Neal from Winston-Salem; and High Point's Dave Phillips, president of Phillips Industries.

"It was interesting to me and the committee," Carson says, "not only the excitement, but the number of people who came together at one time to make a pitch. ... They weren't interested in the niceties of how things were done. They were interested in getting something done."

That's because the Triad, with its heavy emphasis on manufacturing, is in dire straits, says Jim Melvin, president of 1st Home Federal Savings and Loan in Greensboro. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know we're falling behind," he says.

From 1980 to 1990, Forsyth County's population grew by 9%, with Guilford growing at 10%. Compare...