RE: “The Innovation Center Project” (ICP) as a “bridge” between innovation supportive research university faculty & small tech biz on a regional cluster basis (A “scalable Tech Innovation Demo” Project)

Thank you for your thoughtful discussion on the “interface”.

I have working to enable such an “interface” inspired by my own “tech innovation experience” and the few “success models” exisitng at research university communities here in the east coast.

I am also an independent tv producer at the Fairfax Community TV, Channel 10, working to educate my community on the value of “innovation supportive culture” for strategic (long) perspective.

My “visual model” for the ICP is given in my above mentioned website, at “Tech Innovation Center”.

I welcome an opportunity for dialogue with anyone interested in connecting our two communities in Boston Regionnl Cluster and Northern Virgnia/DCM Cluster perspective in future.

Thanks

Avi Dey,
Coordinator,
The Innovation Center Project (ICP Northern Virginia Module)
Northern Virginia

I suggest to take a look at the EC (European Community ) applications to bring universities and industry together. EC scientific projects are very succesful to bring those different parties together and to turn the innovations to the real products. And the cost is shared between the EC governments and the project partners.

I would like to quote from my own statement, which I shared with the leaders of Institutions and Industries while at the Indian Institute of Science some months back in connection with the Engineering Design India 2007.

Institutions and Industries are two separate ‘biological phenomena ‘ like a Man and Wife.

A Mother- the University-can only give births to a child- the Student.
It is only the Father – the Industry- that can help a woman to become a Mother.I mean to say that the Father can not give birth to a child.

The father can never do a mother’s job and vice versa. And for further growth or expansion of humanity the man needs another woman and naturally it won’t be the mother again. For development of human knowledge we need both. In fact both the father and mother are only facilitators. They are only the means and not the ends. The real end results are got from the contributions – whether positive or negative from the Human Resources.
To put it in another way theory is only based on practice and a record of the practices. And practice is based on the theory, which is a continuous up gradation

Upon entry into Industry, the young, trained, focused, nurtured graduate is suddenly faced with the daunting prospects of having to start at the bottom rung of a seemingly hostile, multi-layered, impermeable, corporate environment. All his/her University experiences are suddenly of no apparent usefulness. This is the Mother of all Rude Awakenings.

To my mind, at least, there needs to be a smooth passage leading between Universities & Industry, with constant skill interchange mechanisms. The day academia & industrialists can smoothly inter-connect, inter-operate & forge alliances of equals, will be the beginning of an era of smooth, continuous innovation.

who has the ‘better business model’? well, great universities can measure their durability in centuries while great companies may be lucky to measure theirs in decades…

all too true – except that most great universities (unlike most great companies) are explicit creatures of subsidy… american universities are subsidized by the state, by the nation and by tax policies that insulate those institutions from market pressures that sometimes crush their for-profit counterparts…indeed, try to deduct a donation to intel or microsoft or ge on your tax form and say ‘hello’ to the irs…your donation to harvard, mit or berkeley (talk about state-supported!) will get you a pass…

similarly, while i would never call graduate students ’slave labor’ (although i know many, many, many graduate students who call themselves that), it is kinda remarkable that much of the world’s smartest ‘human capital’ works for below market wages – sometimes below minumum wage! – for professors doing ‘novel’ research at places like mit, stanford and carnegie mellon…

my point is not that kenan is ‘wrong’ or ‘inaccurate’ in the provocative ‘false dichotomy’ he presents, it’s that he has been extraordinarily selective in the way he makes his economic case…simple changes in tax policy, cost accounting and intellectual property law could bring a stanford or an mit or a university of california systems to their knees in less than a decade…

…yes, there are subsidies for business…but businesses on average – as kenan well knows – compete in markets with rules and regulations and restrictions far harsher than those endured by the average tenured professor of computer science or molecular biology @ a world-class university…

…i both dislike and despise the ’start/complete’ dichotomy kenan proposes as a model…and it will cause a good laugh at places like google and akamai (among others)…but that’s a subject for another post :-)

The strength of Universities is that their workforce (Students) are unhampered in their intellectual pursuits and therefore can conduct fundamental research or question current thinking.

This really forms the basis for breakthrough innovation, while businesses are constrained in their long term thinking as there is pressure to deliver to shareholder expectations. Businesses have become increasingly driven by short term concerns especially with the tyranny of quarterly performance targets. The opportunity for both lies in close collaboration.

A true collaboration between businesses and Universities will leverage the strength of each party. Faculty members and students who “Start” a novel concept will see their concepts come to fruition when they are commercialized by their business counterparts who are good at “Completing”.

In exceptional cases such as Silicon Valley & the Route 128 area, this collaboration shines where Stanford/Berkley for the valley and MIT/Harvard/BU for Route 128 have been the incubators for taking novel concepts from academe to commercial success. It is of course ironic that in spite of Massachusetts’ higher patents per capita compared to California, Silicon Valley still outstrips Route 128 as the seed bed of research based industrial development.

The question is how to replicate this extra-ordinary marriage of academe & industry. Perhaps the answer is for a metropolitan area to apply Michael Porter’s Diamond of Competitive Advantage to pursue specific areas where all key players – research universities, industry and the government can focus their efforts to achieve regional competitive advantage.

A shared vision among the leaders in all three spheres could act as a catalyst to propel a region forward.