Powerful Partners

Federally funded research laboratories in Colorado — with alphabet-soup acronyms such as JILA, NOAA, NEON, NIST — partnering with the state’s research universities and local companies, constitute the backbone of the state’s high-tech economy. They are leaders in developing new technologies and finding ways to launch them in the commercial world.

The state’s 25 federal labs — from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder to the Centers for Disease Control, in Fort Collins — form one of the largest concentrations of such labs in the United States. The…