Illinois Technology Corridor (Chicago, Naperville, Elgin: layoffs, schools, suburbs)

[waltlantz]

I hear of a fabled region of Chicago's western suburbs that has many headquarters or regional offices of technology firms, does any body know it's exact location?

[gardener34]

I think that would probably be along the I-88 in Naperville, in which Lucent technologies, Tellabs and BP complexes would be. Lucent and Tellabs of course, has been battered in the past 5-7 years with layoffs, ever since post 9/11, (seems like one big long recession to me due to the "jobless recover" after that one.) They actually have empty buildings they are trying to sell I guess.

Personally I have found that the majority of companies that advertise for positions in the metro area seem to always be on the North Shore. Unfortunately commuting from far western burbs to north suburbs is nearly an impossibility.

[sgresident]

truthfully, the corridor goes all along I88 to dekalb!

[via chicago]

Illinois Technology and Research Corridor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The concept of the corridor was big during the tech boom, but as was mentioned above, a lot of those companies have gone down the tubes and theres a lot of unfilled office capacity out that way.

[Steve-o]

THere are really 2 corridors... one on I-88 starting just East of the Rt. 47 underpass and stretching all the way to Oak Brook and perhaps beyond. Its a mega-corridor of just about every company you can think of. Some major ones are Tellabs, Lucent, etc, but lined with HQs of hundreds of other non-tech companies (ie Sara Lee, Ace Hardware, McDonalds, etc).

The other corridor is on I-90 from rougly Elgin-area all the way to Des Plaines.

[hsw]

Look at where major tech cos. (by stock market value) are HQ'd

Many "fabled" regions (and engineering schools) from ~20yrs ago like Bos' Route 128, etc are amusingly irrelevant today

Chic has no relevant tech cos.; Moto is a dying midget up in Schaumburg; biggest cos. in Chic are McD's and Abbott

Bos only has puny EMC (despite MIT in region)

Seattle only has stagnant MSFT and small AMZN (and no notable engineering school)

Aus has dying Dell (and no notable engineering school)

LA has puny Broadcom (Caltech is a nonentity in alums who've achieved much in tech)

SiliconValley has a litany of $100Bn+ mkt cap tech giants...Oracle, Google, Apple, Cisco, Intel, HP...and is most likely to produce future googles as most of world's leading VCs are based in SV and Stanford and Berkeley are both based in region (and nearly every top grad of U-IL Engineering or MIT heads to SV to go to grad school or to get a job or to start a new co.)

[Steve-o]

Originally Posted by hsw

biggest cos. in Chic are McD's and Abbott

Right.