If Deltopia was Santa Barbara’s annual monument to playing hard, then TechTopia may be its answer on the other side of the coin: Work hard.
On Wednesday afternoon, less than a mile from UC Santa Barbara and just off the highway, the Santa Barbara South Coast Chamber of Commerce gathered business leaders, engineers, researchers, and executives at OASIS, a newly opened innovation hub in Goleta, to make a point that locals do not often make loudly enough: Santa Barbara is not simply an expensive surf town with good weather. It is also a place where companies are building quantum computers, cancer diagnostics, semiconductor packaging systems, and software meant to shape entire industries.
“We are home to the highest concentration of PhDs per capita outside Silicon Valley,” said Kristen Miller, president and CEO of the Santa Barbara South Coast Chamber of Commerce. “What we learned was that each individual entity was pulling a lot of weight, attracting talent, and attracting investment, changing the world, and putting out advancements in technology. But there was a longing to work together.”…