The Long Island region, with roots in the aerospace, defense, and agricultural industries, is recognized as a leader in high-technology industries: biotechnology, electronics, medical imaging/health information systems, and graphic communications. More than 300 life sciences businesses, over 1,700 software businesses, and approximately 400 electronics businesses call Long Island home and employ more than 30,000 people.

Long Island’s two counties, Nassau and Suffolk, are home to 2.7 million people. The counties are adjacent to New York City.

Long Island has a self-sustaining, broadly diversified economy supporting more than 1.2 million jobs. The services sector — including education and healthcare, leisure and hospitality, and professional firms — accounts for more than 40 percent of nonfarm employment.

Long Island’s manufacturing base is heavily oriented toward high-tech. Over the next decade, Long Island companies will fulfill contracts from the U.S. Department of Defense worth millions of dollars. The defense-related projects, along with the likelihood of ongoing security-related expenditures, will continue to boost technology, design, and research.

Long Island has served as a breeding ground for numerous small and mid-sized high-tech firms employing thousands of engineers and scientists, with a strong concentration of electrical and electronics engineers, computer scientists, and operations researchers.

Productive Work Force
Since 1990, the productivity of the Long Island worker, as measured by the value-added per employee, has outpaced the average U.S. worker by approximately $7,000 annually per employee.

Among the outstanding research and educational institutions located in the region are Brookhaven National Laboratories; Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories; Stony Brook University Advanced Energy Research & Technology Center, and Center of Excellence in Wireless & Information Technology; Hofstra University; Adelphi University; and New York Institute of Technology.

There are also a number of university-supported business incubators on Long Island in a variety of high-tech specialties graduating companies like Vasomedical, inGenious Targeting Inc., and Viatronix. More than 282,000 students are enrolled in Long Island’s 22 colleges and universities.

Long Island provides a highly skilled work force combined with a very high standard of local education. Long Island attracts significant engineering talents, critical to this global business unit. The Anorad division, designers and manufacturers of precision linear motion systems and factory automation equipment, constructed a cleanroom-based facility in the Brookhaven Empire Zone, in close proximity to research resources at Stony Brook University. Anorad also has engineering and manufacturing facilities in Israel, the Netherlands, and Shanghai, China.

Outstanding Achievements

• • Many inventive Long Islanders have applied science for practical benefit, including the huge Grumman engineering teams that built the Apollo lunar landers.
• • The medical screening technique called magnetic resonance imagine (MRI) was also born on Long Island, thanks to the work of Raymond Damadian of Fonar Corp. in Melville, and Paul Lauterbur, a former chemistry and radiology professor at Stony Brook University.
• • As for the next generation, Long Island schools have been matching or surpassing their New York City counterparts in the nation-leading production of Westinghouse (now Intel) science prize winners.

Centers of Excellence
Each of the New York State Centers of Excellence supports high-technology ventures through a collaborative approach among the state, academia, private venture capital companies, and other private- and public-sector parties. This initiative was established to encourage rapid commercialization of scientific breakthroughs.

Over the past decade, Long Island has emerged as a leading worldwide center for information technology. To best capitalize on this advantage, spur economic growth, advance scientific research, and develop the technologies of tomorrow, the Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology was created. The Center of Excellence, located on the Stony Brook University campus, provides the support, expertise, and leadership businesses need to create a rich and dynamic technological future. The center’s mission is to help Long Island and New York State become the global leaders in the wireless revolution through the development and commercialization of new products and technologies.