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Suggested Citation:"Keynote Address II--C. D. Mote, Jr.." National Research Council. 2009. Understanding Research, Science and Technology Parks: Global Best Practices: Report of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12546.
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Suggested Citation:"Keynote Address II--C. D. Mote, Jr.." National Research Council. 2009. Understanding Research, Science and Technology Parks: Global Best Practices: Report of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12546.
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Page 48
Suggested Citation:"Keynote Address II--C. D. Mote, Jr.." National Research Council. 2009. Understanding Research, Science and Technology Parks: Global Best Practices: Report of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12546.
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Page 49
Suggested Citation:"Keynote Address II--C. D. Mote, Jr.." National Research Council. 2009. Understanding Research, Science and Technology Parks: Global Best Practices: Report of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12546.
×
Page 50
Suggested Citation:"Keynote Address II--C. D. Mote, Jr.." National Research Council. 2009. Understanding Research, Science and Technology Parks: Global Best Practices: Report of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12546.
×
Page 51
Suggested Citation:"Keynote Address II--C. D. Mote, Jr.." National Research Council. 2009. Understanding Research, Science and Technology Parks: Global Best Practices: Report of a Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12546.
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Page 52

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Keynote Address II Introduction Mary Good University of Arkansas at Little Rock; and Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy Dr. Good next invited Dr. Dan Mote, president of the University of ­Maryland (UM), to deliver the second Keynote Address. She described him as another “friend of science and technology” and said that he has strengthened S&T pro- grams throughout his institution during his tenure. His goal, she said, was to “lead the state in development of a high-tech economy, especially in ICT, bioscience, biotechnology, and nanotechnology—in other words, the emerging technologies that will drive the 21st century.” She noted also his accomplishments in expand- ing university partnerships with corporate and federal laboratories, and his role in bringing to College Park the first research park sponsored by the People’s Republic of China outside the mainland. He has also helped create M Square, a new research park affiliated with the university. C. D. Mote, Jr. University of Maryland In the spectrum of research parks, Dr. Mote began, M Square is a “small en- deavor” very much focused on the University of Maryland. Nonetheless, he said, it served a function at the university that could not be served in any other way. He said that the University of Maryland placed a high value on innovation and entrepreneurship in everything it does, and that this culture leads directly to a partnership mode of operation. Having healthy partnerships expand assets, he said, and the domains in which an institution can work. Partnerships also increase the speed with which people can execute their operations. Today’s partnerships between universities, industries, and government are increasingly globalized and exist in many new combinations. In a university, a 47

48 UNDERSTANDING RESEARCH, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY PARKS partnership might form at the faculty or college level, or as a consortium of uni- versities. In industry, partnerships may form at the level of multinationals, local firms, or industry associations. In government, partnerships may involve cities, states, regions, and entire countries, raising the complexity of the average partner- ship far beyond what it was 10 or 20 years ago. The research park, he said, fills the need for a multipurpose structure where partners from multiple sectors can interact in the physical proximity so important to innovation. For a university, a park can bring about a powerful expansion of the university’s mission. An Unusual Partnership with China The openness of the University of Maryland has led to one unusual interna- tional partnership based on the research park concept—the UM-China Research Park. This partnership originated in 2002, when Chu Wang Wa, then Minister of Science and Technology, was looking for a site in the United States to develop a university-industry-government partnership. The University of Maryland was selected, agreeing to provide services from both the School of Engineering and the School of Business, along with a university outreach group. Staff members were sent from China to help develop the park, and last summer the university sent two vice presidents and two deans on a tour to recruit Chinese companies. Working in Beijing, Shanghai, and Suzhou under the sponsorship of the Ministry of S&T, Maryland recruited about ten companies for the new park. This partnership has produced a number of additional programs, said Dr. Mote, including a flexible training program for Chinese middle-management executives. These executives may design their studies from a wide range of top- ics, including the U.S. government, management, Olympic games management, democracy, banking, and finance. About 1,000 people have come for two months to a year of training. The university also hosts a Confucius Institute Program, created after China’s admission to the World Trade Organization. Set up by the Chinese national Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, its purpose is to help other countries learn about Chinese culture and language. After a pilot program at Maryland in 2004, the program is now held at more than 30 sites in the United States and 200 around the world, all of them under the auspices of the UM-China partnership. It offers degree programs in Chinese in business, engineering, journalism, criminal justice, agriculture, and public policy. Partnership with the State and Industry The entrepreneurial and innovative spirit of the university has led to activities with many partners. One of these is the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute, a partnership between UM and the state of Maryland. For more than 20 years, the Institute has carried out economic development activities for the state. One

Keynote Address II 49 is the state’s most successful business incubator, he said, which was created in 1985. The Institute also runs a bioprocess scale-up facility, which allows com- panies to scale up their processes from bench-level bioproduction to production scale. Another major activity is the Maryland Industrial Partnerships, a research program that brings faculty members together with companies with the objective of creating greater value for products. In addition, a venture accelerator helps move technologies developed by faculty and students to commercialization, and a Technology Startup Boot Camp brings hundreds of would-be entrepreneurs to weekend camps to learn principles of entrepreneurship. These and other related activities have brought about $17 billion in revenue to the state of Maryland since 1984, some $14 billion of this from research activi- ties. The Institute is credited with creating about 7,000 jobs, a significant figure for a small state. As might be expected, the business school at the university is integrally involved in such programs. The Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, founded in 1986, is an entrepreneurial institute that focuses on enterprise creation. Major features include a networked program to improve capital access, an executive mentoring program, and the weekly “pitch Dingman” competitions in which competitors pitch their business idea for the chance of winning a $500 prize. A major asset of UM, said Dr. Mote, is its location near many federal agen- cies and institutes. Many of these have research and training partnerships at or near the M Square Park, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin- istration (NOAA), NIST, Department of Homeland Security, National Security Administration, Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, NASA, Small Business Administration, and National Archives. The Need for a Research Park With such assets and other entrepreneurial activities, he asked, why did the university need a research park? Dr. Mote said that a park is an “essential tool for institutions with an entrepreneurial and innovative culture that hoped to benefit from complicated partnerships on a global scale.” One need is the physi- cal space and facilities afforded by a park that are not available on a university campus. Another is the need to be able to do proprietary or classified research, which is not easily done in an academic environment. A third is the ability to ac- commodate a large off-campus work force to achieve the clustering, resonance, and mutual energy of people working and thinking together. Finally, a research park can uniquely bring in the many nonuniversity interests required by complex partnerships, including private industry services, security for confidential busi- ness activities, and government facilities. Such considerations underlay the creation of M Square, he said, which sought to attract people who would benefit from being close to the university and who would bring benefits to the university as well. Most park activities fell

50 UNDERSTANDING RESEARCH, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY PARKS under one of four broad science and technology themes. One theme featured a new national center for weather and climate prediction that NOAA is building on 10 acres of land. The center would partner with the university and with NASA/ Goddard Space Flight Center, and would hire about 800 employees. Already in the park are the Joint Global Climate Change Institute, run jointly by UM and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and funded by the Department of Energy. Another tenant is the Earth Systems Science Interdisciplinary Center, a $25 mil- lion-per-year program specializing on earth systems modeling. The second park theme concerns language and national security in a broad context. A major initiative established under this theme involved both the Cen- ter for the Advanced Study of Language, a university-affiliated research center funded by the government, and a National Foreign Language Center that studied uncommon languages. This center has also established the Star Talk pilot immer- sion summer camp program. Two other programs on the campus that interfaced with this initiative were the National Flagship Language Program in Persian and the National Flagship Language Program in Arabic. A third theme is food safety and agriculture and features four programs: • U.S. Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Ser- vices (APHIS). • Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN). • UM/FDA Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (JIFSAN). • UM Center for Food, Nutrition and Agriculture Policy. Also in the park is the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services, which partners with other activities on campus, including the Avian Influenza Project, a consortium of 17 institutions funded by USDA. The fourth theme, intelligence, is focused around IARPA, the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity. This is a new government program that is modeled on DARPA. The objective of IARPA is to consolidate the highest level of forward-looking intelligence research. Dr. Mote said the recent recruitment of IARPA to the park was considered a major event, and one reason for the park’s selection, he said, is the presence of other security-related activities—the Labora- tory for Physical Sciences, which had already partnered with the National Secu- rity Agency for more than 50 years, and the Laboratory for Telecommunication Sciences. Other “seeds” for IARPA were the Joint Quantum Institute of NIST and the Center for Advanced Study of Language. The ability to partner with IARPA, said Dr. Mote, which would not be possible on a university campus, further il- lustrated the value of a research park. He illustrated some physical features of M Square, which provides more than 2 million square feet of space on a 138-acre site. It has attracted some

Keynote Address II 51 $500 million of private construction and has received $5 million from the state, creating about 6,000 jobs. Important surrounding features include facilities of FDA, the American Center for Physics, Raytheon, USDA, the Metro/MARC Transit Station, and Baltimore-Washington International Airport. Less than a mile away and about eight miles outside the District of Columbia, a new mixed-use, 38-acre University Town Center (East Campus) is being created, allowing people to both live and work at the park. He concluded by saying that although the park area is small in relation to many parks, it does make an important contribution to the university and the larger community. “The University of Maryland research park serves the mission of the university,” he said, “by adding dimension to its partnership opportunities with industry and government on a global scale that cannot be fulfilled in any other manner that we have discovered.” Discussion In response to a question about the qualifications for inclusion in the park, Dr. Mote said that each proposal must be considered in light of four criteria: 1. What is innovative about this idea? 2. What is entrepreneurial about it—i.e., how are you going to leverage your money to get this done? 3. What kind of partnership is included that will expand your asset base? 4. To what degree is it an international project? These criteria, he said, have acted as an effective filter for candidate projects. Asked what kinds of policies could have made the park work better, Dr. Mote replied that once the state or county government sees that a park is credible and functional, more investment in the startup phase is key. He said that M Square is now probably beyond the “valley of death,” where many new ideas perish for lack of support, but that the park has been helped by such “miracles” as the NOAA and IARPA agreements. Even so, timely financial support from the government would have reduced startup difficulties and accelerated its progress. Asked what principles have led to the successful start of M Square, Dr. Mote cited the design of partnerships that bring benefits to both the university and ten- ants. He said that most tenants came because they were attracted by university assets. It would be even more desirable if it had additional land, with affordable housing and schools. On the topic of potential conflicts between university standards and confiden- tial or secret work, he said that graduate students were not allowed to participate as part of their degree programs or dissertations. They were allowed to work on such projects, however, and in fact their presence was attractive to employers and used as a recruitment tool. The university has also developed ways to hire people

52 UNDERSTANDING RESEARCH, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY PARKS jointly—for example, faculty may have joint appointments at NIST and UM in nanotechnology. They offer special appointments for people at government labs, including the title of College Park Professor, giving no pay but otherwise con- ferring the rights of a faculty member, such as the ability to supervise graduate students’ research projects. In response to a question about intellectual property, Dr. Mote said there is significant effort to commercialize intellectual property developed at the uni- versity, led by the Office of Technology Commercialization, and UM-Net, a u ­ niversity-wide network of venture and commercialization services, researchers, and entrepreneurs. “They are constantly looking for entrepreneurs who want to do these kinds of things,” he said, “and in the research park they can do proprietary work, with strong encouragement from us.”

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Many nations are currently adopting a variety of directed strategies to launch and support research parks, often with significant financial commitments and policy support. By better understanding how research parks of other nations operate, we can seek to improve the scale and contributions of parks in the U.S. To that end, the National Academies convened an international conference on global best practices in research parks.

This volume, a report of the conference, includes discussion of the diverse roles that research parks in both universities and laboratories play in national innovation systems. The presentations identify common challenges and demonstrate substantial differences in research park programs around the world.

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