SSTI Digest

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty committee has suggested that the university provide off-campus facilities to help faculty perform classified public service or research involving the nation’s security. In the Public Interest, a report of the Ad Hoc Faculty Committee on Access To and Disclosure of Scientific Information of MIT, presents recommendations for the university in handling classified work in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The Massachusetts Technology Council named Carol Meier as its new Executive Director, succeeding Katherine Raphaelson who is relocating to Washington D.C.

Columbus Tech Councils Merge

To establish more clout, eliminate confusion and duplication, and cut costs, the Columbus Technology Leadership Council and the Industry & Technology Council of Central Ohio are merging into a new entity, according to the Columbus Dispatch. The details for the new organization, including its new name, will be announced later this year.

Louis Soares, project manager for workforce development at the Rhode Island Technology Council (RITEC), is leaving to accept a fellowship at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University.

The Institute for Government Innovation at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government recently announced open competition for its 2002 annual awards program.



The Innovations in American Government Awards focuses on the quality and responsiveness of U.S. government at all levels and promotes innovative approaches to meeting challenges. Begun in 1986, the program has recognized 295 innovative programs that have received $17.9 million in grants. Of these programs, 150 have been named winners and received $100,000 grants while 145 have been named finalists and received $20,000 grants.



Five initiatives were chosen among 15 finalists in the 2001 competition, including California’s Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) program. MESA has built a network of support for disadvantaged students by teaming educators with corporate activists. The program's accomplishments are many:

As a means of highlighting the performance and composition of state economies, Harvard's Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, led by Dr. Michael Porter, has published profiles on all 50 states and the District of Columbia.



The profiles, available at http://www.people.hbs.edu/mporter/stateprofiles.htm, include data based on the Cluster Mapping project — a multi-year effort to statistically define clusters and analyze regional economies in the U.S. Relevant economic areas for companies and metropolitan areas, as defined by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, are outlined. The profiles are arranged by the following topics:

Albany, New York
Health Reseach Inc., a branch of the New York State Department of Health, is looking to move its Pharmacogenomics Institute to a vacant laboratory in Rensselaer Technology Park, according to a recent article published in the Times Union. The 25,000-square-foot building that housed the Virogenics Corp., a vaccine-research company that left in 2000, has not been officially purchased. The state expects to lease the site when the Rensselaer County Industrial Development Agency closes on the purchase.

University of Buffalo Entrepreneurial Awards 

An in-depth look at the one-year success of a student company to win last year's first Panasci Entrepreneurial Awards at the University of Buffalo recently was highlighted in the Buffalo News. 



The three students who comprise Student Voice received $25,000 in seed capital as first prize in a competition administered by the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership (CEL) in the School of Management. Student Voice, a market research firm specializing in data on college-age consumers, uses personal digital assistants and peer-to-peer, in-person interviews for data collection. 



The students' award was provided through a $1 million endowment donated to the university by UB alumna Henry Panasci, a pharmacist/business executive turned venture capitalist. Second prize recipients received $15,000. Seventeen new student teams have entered this year's competition, a field which will be narrowed to five finalists for presentations in January. 



To compete for the awards, UB students submit a business plan outlining the need for a product or service and its target market, including a description of the methods for bringing it to market. Entries are judged based on the soundness of the proposed product or service, marketability and chances for success. 



More information on the Panasci Entrepreneurial Awards, modeled after a successful Massachusetts Institute of Technology program (see below), is available at: http://www.mgt.buffalo.edu/cel/panasci.shtm

"If technology is at the core of the Innovation Economy, then investment in research and development is one of the principal drivers in the creation of that technology."



The sentence, lifted from the new Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC) report, Maintaining the Innovation Edge: The Case for Creating a Massachusetts Science and Technology Strategy, is valid for the entire country but rings especially true for the Commonwealth, a perennial leader in R&D investment and innovation. Past MTC research reveals innovation is at heart of nine key industry clusters in the Commonwealth. In fact, 25 percent of the state's total employment is tied directly to technological innovation.



Written by MTC Director of Federal Programs Bob Kispert, Maintaining the Innovation Edge scrutinizes R&D funding in the state over the past decade and unveils some unsettling trends for the future growth and stability of the Massachusetts economy:

With the emphasis many state and local tech-based economic development organizations have placed on biotechnology over the past 12-18 months, few are far enough along in implementing their strategies to point to more than a handful of successes or new construction projects. The recent explosion in public investment of resources and policies toward developing local biotech capacity is largely based on the promise of anticipated economic gains in the near or not-so-near future. 



Independent analysis of the long-term impact of specific state and local tech-based economic development policies are rare. Some programs launched in the 1980s that have commissioned outside impact studies, such as the Edison Technology Centers, the Ben Franklin Technology Partnership and Utah’s Centers of Excellence, have discovered strong returns for the public’s investment. (See the 12/20/96, 10/22/99, and 1/28/00 issues of SSTI’s Weekly Digest in our web archives for these stories.) 



Reviews of localized impacts of state tech-based economic development policy are even rarer, which makes a recent study by Eric T. Nakajima and Robert W. Smith, two graduate students in City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley, so unique. The two sought to determine if any cause and effect could be discerned between a state’s economic development policy and industrial growth. They used Worcester, Massachusetts, for their case study partly because of its isolation from metropolitan Boston and the Route 128 phenomenon. 



After several months of interviews and analysis, Nakajima and Smith concluded that today's vibrant biotechnology industry in Worcester is largely attributable to state economic development policies in place during the administration of Gov. Michael Dukakis (1983-1991). 



Several specific initiatives are identified in their report for creating the climate to nourish the community’s current biotech concentration: 

Is a strong university research component critical to local tech-based economic development? Many argue this position, including SSTI (Using Research and Development to Grow State Economies). Using data on royalties, licenses, and job creation figures, others have demonstrated the economic contributions of university R&D. (See for instance, the annual licensing survey from the Association of University Technology Managers.)



But can strong research universities contribute more to local technological innovation than large industrial research laboratories – or can communities achieve the same degree of success in building tech-based economies by concentrating resources toward attracting industrial research laboratories?



At issue, are the local “spillover” effects of industrial and academic research. Spillovers may include, for example, new company formations, job creation, increased research contracts, etc. Which type of research on average, industrial or academic, results in more spillovers to the local economy? John Adams, with the Department of Economics at the University of Florida, explores the issue in Comparative Localization of Academic and Industrial Spillovers, one of the latest Working Papers released by the National Bureau of Economic Research.



Using data from a sample of R&D labs owned by U.S. manufacturing firms, Adams finds the spillover effects of academic research to be more localized than industrial R&D on average. He concludes from his analysis that "localized academic spillovers reflect open science and the industry-university cooperative movement, which encourages firms to work with local universities, so that localization coincides with the public goods nature of science. This situation contrasts with relations with other firms, where contractual arrangements are needed to access proprietary information, often at a considerable distance.”



The policy implications for state and local tech-based economic development efforts, while not addressed in Adams' paper, may be interpreted as supporting efforts to 1) increase academic research activity within local universities, and 2) encourage industry-university collaborative partnerships, which many states do through their centers of excellence and university-industry research grant programs.



Adams concludes that industrial firms tend to turn to local universities more often for applied research, technical assistance, and students/employees. In contrast, industrial partnerships are more selective and more driven by “personnel movements and collaborative ventures.”



Other conclusions in the paper would lend support to tech-based economic development strategies of attracting more federal R&D grants in local academic institutions, stressing investment in basic or early stage research, and encouraging more university patenting. Adams reports the greater the amount of federally supported university R&D near a firm drives localization of academic spillovers and, subsequently, industrial spillovers.



Spillovers from university patenting also was found to be more localized than industrial patenting. The paper also suggests “spillover from new products, although weaker than patent spillovers, are still more localized” for universities than industrial product development.



Adam's last point suggests that state and academic policies and programs that encourage faculty tech-based entrepreneurship and technology commercialization may prove particularly beneficial for building local tech-based economies.



Comparative Localization of Academic and Industrial Spillovers (NBER Working Paper No. 8292) can be purchased online from NBER for $5.00 at: http://www.nber.org/papers/w8292

Christopher Anderson has been promoted to become president of the Massachusetts High Technology Council. Prior to his appointment, Mr. Anderson served as vice president and general counsel to the organization.