Very late response to your comment here (sorry) so I doubt you'll see it but I wanted to respond anyway.

There are VERY interesting things going on in Reno, especially at UNR. MEMS research, solar cell research, biology, biotech, computer vision etc. There's also Sierra Nevada Corp in Sparks which was founded by two former UNR graduate students and is a very successful aerospace company. They are working on their own re-usable space craft in the dream chaser project: http://www.sncspace.com/ss_space_exploration.php Robocoin (bitcoin atm) is here but it's been rather disappointing.

One of the big flaws with this area is that casino gaming and mining have been the biggest draws on the talent pools for engineering. Gaming isn't the big money maker for the state that it once was and innovation wasn't a huge part of the business in the first place.