washington business
T
echnology permeates our daily lives — and our state economy.
It’s the smartphone in the palm of your hand, the apps you use to monitor the news and call a rideshare service, the
tablet tracking plays on the sidelines, the laptops at the coffee shop, and the jets flying overhead.
It’s part of our lives in less obvious ways, too. Tech innovators are also behind the coffee in your hand, the Uggs on your feet
and the North Face hoodie protecting against the cold rain.
Washington isn’t unique in its embrace of technology. Owning a flat-screen TV or smartphone doesn’t make you a part of the
tech economy.
The Washington distinction is that it’s one of the few places in the world that launched the technology revolution. Metropolitan
Seattle, in particular, routinely ranks with San Jose, San Francisco, Boston, Austin, and Raleigh at the top of the tech metro lists.
By size and concentration, Seattle is the sun in the
Northwest’s tech solar system, the force around which
everything revolves. And the tech economy continues to
transform Seattle.
“Most of the cranes that you look around and see throughout
the city skyline now are largely tied to the tech industry,” says
— John Cook, co-founder, GeekWire
John Cook, co-founder of GeekWire, a national tech news
service based in Seattle.
Cook refers both to the expansion of residential housing to
accommodate the influx of new residents and commercial development that
Technology employment
attracts them.
in the state has grown from
While Amazon draws most of the recent attention, the sector’s growth
extends well beyond a single firm or region. Every county in the state has
some tech employment. A 2014 study by University of Washington professor
William Beyers found 14 counties with more than 1,000 people employed
jobs in 1974 to
in a technology-based industry, from carbon fiber and data centers to
environmental cleanup and viticulture and more.
“Most of the cranes that you look around
and see throughout the city skyline now
are largely tied to the tech industry”
96,000
defining the tech sector: not easy as it looks
So pervasive is tech that it’s hard to isolate it from the larger economy.
Fortunately, some of the state’s top economists have done the job well.
Beyers takes a broad view, focusing on industries with twice the statewide
concentration of research and development intensive occupations. He writes,
at a glance
The tech sector broadly defined provides 14
percent of jobs in the state and accounts for
more than two-thirds of the job growth.
When all jobs supported by the tech sector
are counted, they amount to 42 percent of
total statewide employment.
The Seattle technology cluster is one of only
a handful of successful metro hubs in the
world. It continues to diversify and grow.
28 association of washington business
410,000
jobs in 2013, accounting for
statewide
14.1% ofemployment