Three years ago, when the merger between NYU and Polytechnic University was just under way, I wrote a well received opinion piece arguing that aggressive development of New York City’s university-based engineering research programs might prove key to its ambitions to become a center of technology-based business development. I even argued that competition in this arena (between NYU-Poly and Columbia) would be salutary. Apparently, someone was listening, but not exactly in the way I expected!
Some months ago, New York City issued a “request for expressions of interest,” seeking to identify academic institutions anywhere in the world that might want to develop what the City called an “applied science and engineering research campus.” Today, the City announced that it had received 18 expressions of interest, and clearly had met its goal of stimulating worldwide interest. Represented in the pool were a number of strong U.S. institutions (some being usual suspects, and others a bit of surprise) and also institutions in Canada, France, Finland, India, Israel, Korea, Switzerland, and the U.K. Pretty impressive!
The obvious question is why even try and bring in outside institutions — as good as they might be — rather than get behind the growth ambitions of the three largest in-city engineering research programs? Why start from scratch when you can build on gathering strength? Engineering is engineering, and it can be done well or badly, with strong commitment to industrial partnership or not, but there’s nothing magic about Stanford, Cornell, Purdue, or Carnegie Mellon. It’s about size, scale, momentum, and institutional leadership, and the home teams will always be larger than the NYC “satellites” of institutions based elsewhere. So why the competition? No one has been able to give me a good answer, so what follows is purely my own speculation. Feel free to contradict me in the comments.
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For some time, I’ve been arguing that there’s nothing in the typical university’s portfolio of commercialization activities that necessarily needs to be dependent on government grant support. In fact, universities are free to ask private donors to fund anything from the basic operations of the tech transfer office to the costs of running a proof-of-concept or commercialization center.
That universities have typically not asked for such support, but rather have waited for a motivated donor to drop it in their lap unbidden,1 is a function of opportunity cost. Every time a university president makes an “ask” of this kind, that’s one less donor who can be asked for a dormitory, a professorship, or a financial aid fund. To date, few presidents have been able to convince themselves that that are donors who will consider funding commercialization activities who would not otherwise be giving to more conventional entries on the “table of needs.”
Now (my thanks to Cameron Ford at the University of Central Florida’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation for pointing this out to me) we have a real, live example of a university capital campaign that actually prominently features such requests: the $125 million Innovate Carolina campaign launched last month by UNC Chapel Hill. The campaign is modest in size, but daring in what it includes. After the break, you can read or download from Scribd the eight-page “case statement” for the campaign.
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- e.g., Desh Deshpande at MIT. [↩]
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With all the attention on renewable-energy technology, and for all the hopes that politicians have expressed that by pushing dollars into the innovation system they can magically get “cluster” jobs out the other side, I thought I would tell the cautionary story of three extremely impressive energy-tech-type companies that my colleagues1 and I assisted when we worked for the (lately defunct) New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology (NJCST) back in the late 1980s/early 1990s.2
As free-marketeers like to say, politicians don’t create jobs: entrepreneurs and investors do. Absolutely correct. All we did in government was help by providing resources that the entrepreneurs leveraged and exploited at a very early stage of corporate existence. Except in one case where we provided a modest amount of pre-seed financing, I wouldn’t say we even tried to “pick winners.” We applied public funding to create physical environments and incentives for academic/industrial collaboration, we provided a little free publicity and moral support, and then we sat back and watched the inventors and innovators/entrepreneurs do their thing.
After the break I’ll tell what I remember about these firms from the days years ago when I had some inside knowledge, and what I can deduce about their trajectory since based on current publicly available information.3 And then I have some questions for you to ponder about how complex are the forces at work, and what you might expect from innovation programming in energy-tech if you are a politician or policymaker.
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- Especially Joe Montemarano, in the case of the first two companies discussed [↩]
- No, this isn’t the first time in modern history that energy tech has been “hot,” and it’s been obvious for a long time that market innovations would be closely related to R&D in materials science and various engineering technologies. Hence the role for universities and tbed intermediary organizations. [↩]
- Although I’ve done my best to be accurate, I’m sure I’ve made mistakes. If you see any and would like them corrected, let me know and I’ll update the post. [↩]
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The latest UMDNJ/Rutgers reconfiguration plan: implications for research and economic development
Tags: New Jersey, R&D expenditures
First the [former Merck CEO Roy] Vagelos Commission; then the [former Governor Tom] Kean Commission; just this past week, the final report of the UMDNJ Advisory Committee. Here’s a recap of what’s happening with the reorganization of public medical education in New Jersey, and my own evaluation of the outcome, emphasizing the impacts on research budgets (a matter which is underplayed in the advisory committee report).
Since 2003, New Jersey has moved in fits and starts to undo the damage done more than four decades ago under former Gov. William Cahill, who in 1970 — perhaps angered by what he saw as gold-plated research facilities or maybe for more prosaic political reasons following the 1967 Newark riots — severed the Rutgers Medical School from the state university and attached it instead as the new Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS) to what was then called the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (CMDNJ).
That move placed under different institutional ownership facilities that were actually across the street from each other, requiring crippling negotiations between two bureaucracies for any major bioscience research projects, significantly constraining both public universities’ abilities to contribute to regional economic development.
Beyond that, what eventually became UMDNJ was a unique beast, a health-sciences university spread across four widely separated campuses. Among its eight graduate and professional schools were no fewer than three different medical schools, two allopathic and one osteopathic (don’t ask), and one university-owned teaching hospital. It was truly an ungovernable nightmare, and one that soon and unendingly got into trouble.
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Filed under Commentary by David Hochman