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.
More on A (long) tale of three energy-tech companies
- 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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In my last post, I promised a look at why the term “graduated” makes little sense to me in the context of the National Science Foundation’s centers programs. I can adduce some theoretical arguments for my position, and I’ve also assembled a quick-and-dirty table (after the break) summarizing what I could find via superficial Web searching about the current status of centers that NSF regards as “graduated” from the ERC, I/U CRC, and MRSEC programs.
This empirical exploration revealed a bit more evidence for sustainability than I’d suspected, but on the whole I think it’s still unduly optimistic to believe that once federal funding stops, a university-based center will necessarily retain the essential characteristics of what was originally envisioned. That’s not to say the funding has been a failure, only that expectations for sustainability may be unduly high, or perhaps irrelevant.
Of course, it’s the ambition of every funder with public goals (whether federal or philanthropic) to leave behind an enduring, systemic change — if you like, to create a lasting institution focused on the particular set of issues of concern to the funder. However, when you think about what that would mean in the university context, it’s simply not realistic. Universities endure. Centers, typically, do not.
More on Can NSF centers achieve sustainability after graduation? evidence and argument
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As promised in an earlier post, I now have the capability to add a standardized metropolitan-region field to any entry in my tbed database. Consequently, I’ve spent a few hours a week for the last several months revisiting my roughly 1,700 entries, adding, dropping, and revising as necessary to account for the ebb and flow of state and federal programming.
One of the categories I try and track is “national centers,” a broad rubric under which I’ve included major university-based, tbed-oriented research centers sponsored by federal agencies such as NSF, DOE, NASA, parts of DOD, and NIH. There you can sample a dense acronym soup: ERCs, MRSECs, STCs, NSECs, CTSAs, and so on. In the course of my data validation, I made some new observations about one particular acronym: I/U CRCs, the Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers program of the National Science Foundation.
More on Revisiting the NSF I/U CRC program: some recent insights
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An interesting university capital campaign: Innovate Carolina
Tags: Commercialization, Endowments
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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Filed under Commentary by David Hochman