Boulder offers attractive setting for mix of business, pleasure

Boulder offers the perfect mix: A laid-back college town with big-city business smarts.

The city’s approximately 100,000 residents work and play against a mountain backdrop that includes the iconic Flatirons, and the “back range” Indian Peaks Wilderness Area with its snowy Arapaho Glacier. More than 30,000 of those residents attend the University of Colorado-Boulder, with its picturesque campus.

Boulder’s unique setting and its high percentage of residents who wear Spandex belies the high concentration of companies in the aerospace, bioscience, data-storage and software industries. National corporations such as IBM Corp., Ball Aerospace & Technologies Inc., Lockheed Martin Corp., Covidien Inc., Corden Pharma…