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Most of us couldn't tell a nanotube from a polymer. There are people in our state who do know about such things. Many of them are in some way associated with the Red River Valley Research Corridor.
The research being done in an amazing variety of fields is not only good for science and technology, it's good business.
A study asserts that, since its inception five years ago, the partnership of universities and businesses has had a $759 million total economic impact and is responsible for the direct creation of 2,810 jobs.
Can there be any downside in that?
The research corridor is more a concept than a location, though the Red River Valley is its spinal cord. But the University of North Dakota and North Dakota State University are tangible.
The brainchild of Sen. Byron Dorgan, the research corridor is a coordination of the kinds of research being done at the two universities with the kinds of work being done by private industry in everything from biotechnology to software to nanoscale engineering. (A nanometer is pretty small, one billionth of a meter. So this work is being done at the level smaller than molecules, thanks to the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope.)
The research and development have been fueled by grants, federal funding, university budgeting and spending by industry. Since 2002, more than $300 million in funding has flowed.
It's more than a benefit to the valley and the eastern tier of counties. Bismarck State College is involved through the National Energy Training Center. Mayville State University is working with a grant of nearly $1 million from the National Institutes of Health to do biomedical research. There are high-tech companies doing research and development in the process of turning out marvelous widgets for the 21st century. They're in places ranging from Killdeer to Rolla, all the way to Crosby.
Dorgan brought people, especially those from the universities, together in 2002 to get the ambitious effort going. It's grown with the help of the state, particularly the Department of Commerce and Gov. John Hoeven's Centers of Excellence concept.
It all adds up to making North Dakota's R&D climate a fertile one.
North Dakota is now the second leading state in the country in the rate of growth of federal money spent per capita on research and development done by its public colleges and universities, trailing only Hawaii.
The share of the total research pot of money coming here isn't huge in real terms, but the injection of about $60 million a year is significant to us.
The human intellectual energy and entrepreneurial spirit created by the research corridor's existence can significantly affect the state's business climate.
Consider this: The average annual salary of jobs created in the research corridor is $56,000. Mind you, that's only an average. Some of the top jobs must pay very, very well.
This is the kind of economic diversification the state needs.
It's somehow comforting to know that one of the firms in the research corridor, Appereo Systems, has set out "to be the world leader in the emerging field of augmented reality." (Augmented reality? That doesn't sound typically North Dakotan.)
North Dakota: R&D hot spot