Mayor Rahm Emanuel made some waves earlier this month when he and execs from some of Chicago’s hottest tech companies traveled to Urbana-Champaign in a bid to recruit young University of Illinois engineering graduates to move up to Chicago instead of migrating to Silicon Valley.
But the city and the university have much bigger ambitions: the establishment of a university-staffed but locally funded research center/think tank in Chicago that could help put the city’s tech scene into hyperdrive.
