Homegrown Innovation for
a Healthier World
Everyone in Salt Lake City deserves a chance to learn, earn, and live healthy lives.
Salt Lake City, through our Tech Lake City initiative, is invigorating our focus on inclusive growth that empowers upward mobility for both residents and businesses. Our focus for this human-centered approach to economic development is the health care sector, an area in which Salt Lake City already boasts a flourishing foundation of institutions and businesses. With the highest concentration of life science-related jobs in the nation, we have a tremendous opportunity to become a world-class hub for health care innovation.
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“Tech Lake City” is the overarching concept guiding Salt Lake City’s current and future economic development efforts, the centerpiece of which is the fast-growing health care innovation sector.
Mayor Mendenhall launched the Tech Lake City initiative in January 2020 to attract more innovation and tech talent to the City, and to help improve pathways to tech education and employment for all City residents, particularly those in underserved communities. Tech Lake City represents a pivot to a more-proactive, non-traditional approach to economic development focusing on strengthening key sectors, starting with health care innovation.
A key example of this new approach is the City’s work to secure investment to create BioHive, a public-private agency designed to connect and promote the 1,100+ life sciences and health care innovation companies in and around Salt Lake City. BioHive coordinates with its statewide sibling, BioUtah, and interacts with related innovation-focused efforts like the Salt Lake Chamber’s newly created Wasatch Innovation Network.
The Tech Lake City initiative is managed by Clark Cahoon, technology and innovation advisor in the Department of Economic Development, and overseen by department director, Lorena Riffo Jenson.
Why Salt Lake?
Salt Lake City has a strong foundation in the health care innovation sector. Cementing our role as a worldwide health care innovation leader rests on Utah’s historic and current success.
Amplifying this advantage will strengthen and broaden our economic base of larger anchor firms, as well as innovative spin-offs, that create new ways of helping the world while also creating well-paying and satisfying jobs for Salt Lake City residents.
Why Now?
Capturing innovative momentum is essential to shaping a future that works for all Salt Lakers.
Since 2007, even through business cycle fluctuations, growth in the life sciences industry has outpaced the rest of Utah’s economy. In 2020, life sciences employment gains were robust when the state experienced an overall 1.8% contraction in average employment. That same year, Utah’s workforce concentration in life sciences reached 1.9% of all employees, first among states and more than double the national average of 0.9%.
A Legacy of Innovation
Home to the nation’s highest concentration of life science jobs, our city celebrates achievements such as the first successful artificial heart transplant at University of Utah Hospital, and the groundbreaking genetics engineering work of Nobel Prize Winner Mario Capecchi.
Salt Lake City was the home of the first artificial heart successfully implanted in a human. Retired dentist Barney Clark lived 112 days with the device in his chest, an advancement that attracted worldwide media attention to University Hospital
Download the Blueprint
This blueprint includes our vision, mission, guiding principles, action steps, and recommendations, to guide the daily and long-term direction of Salt Lake City’s economic and social development efforts.
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