A Review of the New Initiatives at the NASA Ames Research Center Summary of a Workshop (2001) / Chapter Skim
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III. Introduction
III. Introduction
Pages 21-32
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Its strategic challenge is to integrate those research areas into a new "mission triangle" for the 21St century. A NEW STRATEGIC PLAN FOR AMES As a major participant in this mission, the Ames Research Center, at Moffett Field, California, has undertaken a major effort to develop its own strategic plank ~ See the remarks of Dr.
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As described in the Proceedings by Center Director Henry McDonald and Deputy Director William Berry, new research efforts would be financed by both leasing revenues from partners and from the profits of partnership enterprises. At the same time, its existing Commercial Technology Office is prepared to assist in the recruitment of partners whose work is consistent with NASA's mission and to expand its existing mission of transferring technology to the private sector.
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Research parks are defined by Luger and Goldstein as "organizational entities that sell or lease spatially contiguous land andlor buildings to businesses or other organizations whose principal activities are basic or applied research or development of new products or processes."6 This concept evolved from the older industrial parks, whose first incarnation was the Central Manufacturing District of Chicago, established in 1905. The modern prototype of the research park appeared after World War II with the creation of Menlo Park, California, in 1948.
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These are usually promoted by regional or local governments, often in association with nearby universities and with private companies that occupy the resulting space.~° Public development money is often involved, and the mission statements of many parks include active participation in technology transfer to the private sector and participation in the economic development of their cities, regions, and states. Some parks, like University Heights Science Park in Newark, New Jersey, have strong urban renewal missions.~2 Some of these, like Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are tightly clustered around a single university (in this case, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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The comprehension of the research park phenomenon has also been blurred by political, ideological, and business biases, in that each participant in the development of a park has a particular definition of successes Parks are often seen as cure-alls by developers and local governments, who may hope for job generation, income growth, greater income equality, expanded opportunities for certain groups within the labor force, and economic restructuring of the region. Park developers often describe beneficial changes as results of park creation, but the park's contribution to change is difficult to gauge.
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R&D businesses are likely to cluster within the regions in order to share a specialized labor force, university facilities and expertise, business services, a certain type of social and cultural environment, and access to technical and market information. Consequently, "once a region 'takes off' with a successful research park, it should continue to experience growth in the R&D sector."2i CLUSTERS AND GROWTH: THE ROLE OF HIGH-TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH The suggestion that parks can induce the growth of R&D activity is mirrored by evidence that high-tech activity stimulates regional growth.
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. and hence gain market share, create new product markets, and use resources more productively." Such firms tend to perform larger amounts of R&D than more traditional industries and create positive spillover effects that benefit other commercial sectors by generating new products and processes.23 RISKS The process of creating a new research park carries substantial nsks.
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30 A REVIEW OF THE NEW INITIATIVES AT THE NASA AMES RESEARCH CENTER Another advantage of Ames' location is that the presence of business expertise and facilities allow for the incubation of young businesses. Many parks today support their own incubators, which are designed to reduce business risk for researchers-turned-entrepreneurs by providing many functions: assisting young companies to use technology for economic development; moving discoveries from the lab to the marketplace; locating support services; and obtaining consultation, funding assistance, flexible leases, and office services.28 28 Durso, "Home-Grown R&D," op.
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. continued reductions in public funding for educational institutions from its elementary and secondary schools to the sophisticated network of community colleges, state universities, and the University of California system that jeopardize the rich supply of technical talent and the research base that have historically supported the regional economy."29 The editors of a leading treatise on technology have stated the challenge from a national perspective, describing our "inadequate technical and general education and inadequate retraining at all levels" as a significant obstacle to U.S.
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. Balancing Objectives: How best to manage government-industry partnerships to accomplish NASA mission goals effectively and continue commercially relevant research, while at the same time properly managingand balancing access to federal facilities; Developing Evaluation Metrics: The importance of developing reasonable and accurate metrics to assess successes and failures in a complex, long-term undertaking such as a research park.
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