From Motown to TechTown

(CBS)  Welcome to Asterand, a cutting-edge biotech company that provides human tissue for drug research.

In the last year, the lab's stock nearly doubled from $13 a share to $27now. You'd think they'd have a Silicon Valley headquarters, right?

"When you tell people you're doing high tech work, in downtown Detroit, do people look at you kind of funny?" asked CBS News correspondent Jim Axelrod.

"Yes, they're shocked," said Victoria Blanc, the general manager of operations at Asterand.

Not just any part of Detroit - but TechTown, a five-story former General Motors building where the Corvette was designed. The hope now is that TechTown will be the birthplace of Detroit's next great idea.

When Randall Charlton made Asterand TechTown's first tenant nine years ago, this rundown, beat-up neighborhood was the last place you'd have figured for a renaissance.

"I often joke that even the pigeons were flying in pairs for security purposes," Charlton said.

Now it is home to 90 companies, from attorneys to Web designers.

"When businesses come here, new businesses, what do they get?" Axelrod asked.

"They get more than a bill for the rent every month," Charlton said. "What they get is a supportive environment."

Like the stuff the smallest startup needs to grow big ideas, including research and experts from their partner Wayne State University, right next door.

They are all designed to reverse the flood of jobs lost in Detroit, where unemployment tops 16 percent.

TechTown is setting a high bar. The goal is to grow 400 new companies in the next three years - that's one every three days. But the truest measure of success will be the number of jobs created outside this building for a city that badly needs them.

"We're in a very low-income distressed neighborhood," said Carla Walker Miller.

Walker Miller started her energy company here three years ago. She's now building a $10-million biodiesel plant that'll mean 15 jobs now, maybe 30 in a year.

"Right here in the middle of a bombed-out neighborhood in Detroit?" Axelrod asked.

"Where no one's building and some people don't even want to drive through," Walker Miller said.

TechTown is on track to give Detroit something it hasn't had in a while - a successful export.

"This can be a model for other American cities when we are successful here, people will say, well, hell. If they can do it in Detroit and they got down pretty low, maybe we can do it elsewhere," Charlton said.

If that happens, it'll be move over Motown, here comes TechTown.

[ianlou]

The Detroit area is already a TechTown being the number one source of Factory Automation Machines (Robotics) in the world.

[sjc_1]

FANUC in Japan is the world leader. Cincinnati Milicron in America is a distant second.

[j_flood]

c'mon Detroit...there's more to business than cars ........ my hometown can do.......keep going!!!!

[sjc_1]

Biofuels require plants and equipment that can be made in Detroit. Once you get that going, you can deploy that equipment into the farming regions of Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota and other areas. Detroit has a manufacturing history and going from making cars to making equipment for biofuel plants makes sense.

[stuart-johns2]

In the last year, the lab's stock nearly doubled from $13 a share to $27now.

CBS. I hate to be too technical, speaking of which. But if the stock began at $13 and is now $27 has'nt it MORE than doubled and not, as you say, "nearly doubled"?

At any rate. I think this is great. I wish them much success in their worthy endeavor.

But still, I'll take Motown any day. Motown was a great era of music.

[brianbwb-2009]

Indeed it was, the regional accent of the area's musicians shaped, in large part, the progress of music around the world.

Unfortunately when Motown decided to leave it's talent base for a plush Sunset Blvd. office in Hollywood, both the company's product, and the artists that used to produce it suffered. The ties with the local media were irreparably severed, and the company has never regained it's position near the top of the food chain.

Now what is left has been absorbed into the Universal Music Corporation, diluted by influences from the modern commercial product formulas, and with performers such as George Michael and Lindsay Lohan, which is a total departure from the original sound, with only Stevie Wonder still active from the heyday of the company.

With the decimation of the middle class, due to the mass lay-off of autoworkers in the mid 70s, the live entertainment venues also closed shop, leaving no place for young Detroit musicians to develop.

And so a pivotal sound, and a legitimate way out of poverty was lost, perhaps forever.