Here’s an interesting trend to watch in the convergence of various economic development activities where universities and communities interact.

The Connective Corridor initiative at Syracuse University and the UniversityCity Connections initiative at Colorado State University in Fort Collins are interesting examples I’ve recently come across of universities being used as key components of downtown economic-development strategies.

Both campuses are not quite downtown, but each is clearly conceived as part of the overall asset base of its central city. Through these initiatives, civic leadership is assuring connectivity – both concretely in terms of transportation infrastructure and abstractly in terms of “mind share” – between the healthy asset and the part of town needing improvement or stimulation.

I don’t know Fort Collins except through reading about it for my professional work, but I know Syracuse well enough to know this connectivity is an urgent matter. Without it, the gorgeous architecture of downtown, the emerging arts district of the Near Westside, the Technology Garden business incubator, and the nightlife around Armory Square all remain dangerously disconnected from the source of vitality (and purchasing power) up University Hill.
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Those research institutions that moved early to raise state or other non-federal funding for research on “unapproved” embryonic stem-cell lines now confront an uncomfortable implication or two. Bear with me. . .

Any one who set up such a program understood — though perhaps many outside the university system did not — that not only would they be charging all direct costs of “unapproved” research to non-federal sources, but they would also be forgoing recovery of all related indirect costs.

In other words, if a university financed a facility in which non-approved research would be done, it could not then allocate its amortization of these capital costs to the pool from which indirect cost recoveries are negotiated with the feds. Same with shared research infrastructure and administrative services related to unapproved research projects, and with facilities maintenance.
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You may have caught the news that a coalition of 10 Michigan foundations has committed $100 million to an eight-year New Economy Initiative for Southeast Michigan, an effort to reinvent Detroit’s auto-centric economy through an intensive program of grant-making in science and technology fields.

There’s a lot of local politics involved here: for example, the state attorney general strong-arming Ford Foundation to pay more attention to the region in which it is still incorporated and whence its endowed wealth derives. But what interests me is the frank interest in the role of science and technology in regional economic health by such a large set of staid foundations, including two (Mott and Kellogg) that explicitly disclaimed interest in tbed when I spoke to them for a Battelle project six or seven years ago.

According to the job description posted, the NEI seeks to fund projects including those which: “. . . . improve technology transfer from university and private labs; coordinate and expand local capital networks; . . . launch a promising nonprofit enterprise, such as a new university research center; expand a high-tech enterprise in an inner city. . . ; provide start-up capital to a for-profit enterprise to launch a new high-tech product. . . . ”

Yes, there’s plenty of equal attention to workforce training for targeted populations (the working class and disadvantaged) but this initiative will not be embarrassed to fund university-based S&T projects for their own sake, and even to help spin-off for-profit enterprises get capitalized. Wow.

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