A perennial look at the region's technology economy offered a mixed picture for 2004, with the number of tech companies and jobs falling that year but wages rising for those who were working in the sector.

That's according to the Pittsburgh Technology Council, which yesterday released its annual state of the industry report for 2004, the latest year for which complete information was available.

The tech advocacy group's review of the 13-county southwestern Pennsylvania region estimated the number of tech jobs at 213,000 in 2004, down 3,000, or 1.4 percent, from 2003.

The number of firms in the information technology, life sciences, environmental technology and advanced materials and manufacturing fields also dipped slightly -- to 7,559 in 2004 from 7,690 the year before, it said.

But the report also noted that despite the decreases in jobs and companies, wages climbed in all sub-sectors except the advanced materials field. And the environmental technology cluster, which includes firms that provide environmental equipment and services, saw increases in the number of firms, employees and wages.

Jerry Paytas, director of the Carnegie Mellon University Center for Economic Development, which compiled the statistics, blamed the dip in jobs and firms to the bottoming out of the regional economy in 2004.

He doubts that the 2005 statistics, which won't be collected by the state until this month, will be much different. "The economy has been tough for a while, I don't think it'll be worse, but I don't know if it'll be good," Dr. Paytas said.

Both the tech council and Dr. Paytas said the figures show that there aren't enough new businesses being created in the region. Allegheny County, Dr. Paytas said, generates less than 20 new corporations per 10,000 residents, while the state average is 22.

The state also lags behind the rest of the country in company formation, Dr. Paytas said, coming in between 47th and 50th in new business creation.

Dr. Paytas and the tech council cited Pittsburgh's history as a "company town," where throngs of residents worked in large companies built by innovators such as Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie, as the reason that entrepreneurism lags locally.

For generations, it was easier to work for someone else than to strike out on one's own, particularly given the comparatively high wages and broad employment offered by the big corporate titans before their downsizing in the 1970s and 1980s.

"People who might be quite capable of starting a company just didn't have the legacy of doing that," said tech council spokesman Kevin Lane. "But I think we are turning a corner."

Mr. Lane cited an increase in the number of federal grants awarded to local small businesses seeking to commercialize promising technology. The total amount of these so-called Small Business Research Innovation grants hit $13 million in 2004, up 17 percent from 2003.

Mr. Lane added that he expects to see more jobs generated in the region's "emerging" tech clusters -- cybersecurity, data storage, electro-optics, robotics, nanotechnology and micro-electromechanical systems.

Still, the bulk of the region's tech jobs are held in the life sciences cluster, which the council reported employs 115,144 -- more than 100,000 of which work at hospitals and doctor's offices.

Excluding those jobs, the area's total tech industry employment drops to 111,999.

Mr. Lane acknowledged that health-care jobs skewed the overall count of tech jobs in the region, which in their entirety account for roughly 23 percent of total local jobs. But he noted that health care is included because any region rich in life sciences "couldn't have gotten where it is without a very robust health services sector."

The tech council's report was released as it hosted U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow at Canonsburg-based software firm Ansys, where he took questions from a small group of local tech firm executives.