Triad colleges seek new avenues for partnerships

BYLINE: Matt Evans

The Piedmont Triad Partnership is using its Workforce Innovations in Regional Economic Development, or "Wired" initiative, to revive formal efforts to cultivate collaboration by 20 colleges and universities in the region.

The Higher Education Innovations Council so far includes 19 two- and four-year schools, both private and public (organizers declined to identify the holdout), who have met as a group three times. A fourth meeting is scheduled for Nov. 1.

About half of those schools have been represented by a president or chancellor so far, as opposed to a designated staff representative, according to Jim Donnelly, the partnership's vice president for innovation and outreach, who is coordinating the work of the council.

That high-level attention signifies broad acceptance of the key role higher education has in economic development, he said.

"One of the things we've recognized from the outset is that our region has tremendous assets in higher education," said Donnelly, citing the Triad's four UNC schools, three research institutions and its network of community colleges. "We want to give them a platform to engage with each other and with industry."

The council has identified two main projects to start with, Donnelly said. One will involve building an inventory of all of the "assets" at each school in the region that relate to any of the four industry clusters economic developers in the region have chosen to focus on: advanced manufacturing, logistics and distribution, health care and the creative arts.

The inventory will build on a more limited effort last year by the state's Small Business and Technology Development Center by using campus visits and other methods of data gathering to identify any facilities, equipment, research, academic programs or other resources on each campus relating to the target industries.

The higher education council will work with the roundtables the partnership has organized for each industry to identify which assets are most valuable, and will begin testing their data-gathering methodology first at Guilford College and Davidson County Community College.

The goal will be to get that asset inventory into a format that can be kept up to date and is accessible to the public, probably via the Internet, though Donnelly said that is still under discussion.

"What we're starting with now is figuring out what will be the most helpful, which will impact how we can best distribute the information," he said.

Lines of communication

The higher education council is also tackling a somewhat more nebulous challenge, that of improving their own channels of communication among the widely spread group.

Though the schools represented run the gamut from community colleges to medical research institutions, the hope is that more and better communication will result in new partnerships or ways to fill unmet academic and training needs.

At the first meeting of the council, for example, when the representative from Surry Community College mentioned that a new local employer had asked for a welding training class that Surry didn't have the right equipment for, Davidson County Community College President Mary Rittling thought immediately of her own school's new $225,000 state-of-the-art welding training lab.

"I said, 'We can help with that,'" Rittling recalled, and the end result was Davidson providing the needed training at its campus in Mocksville, in Davie County. "We each have strengths, and the whole point is to build on each other's strengths."

There are many opportunities for even bigger collaborations, said Steven House, associate vice president for academic affairs at Elon University. He said his school is now exploring ways that it might get involved in the new Gateway University Research Park project -- itself a collaboration between UNC-Greensboro and N.C. A&T -- after having talked about it with Gateway director John Merrill at a meeting.

"I just said to him, 'Tell me if it would be a no or a maybe,'" for Elon to work out a role to play in the project, House said. "He told me, 'I think the answer is yes,' so we're talking about that now ... Having that link has been very helpful."

Recognition of the importance of higher education in the regional economy is by no means a recent revelation, nor is the effort to coordinate colleges regionally.

In 2001, Wake Forest University spearheaded the formation of a similar group, recalls Dan Lynch, president of the Greensboro Economic Development Partnership, who helped organize that effort along with Bill Dean of Wake Forest's Piedmont Triad Research Park.

That group met only three times before disbanding, having come to the conclusion that there was already sufficient interaction between them, Lynch said. That the formal structure didn't last doesn't mean it didn't work, though.