I can’t do justice to a comprehensive review of yesterday’s FiReGlobal (West Coast) conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seattle. Instead, I’ll just give a few of my key takeaways. The all-day event, organized by Strategic News Service, focused on how to solve some of the most pressing problems in technology, business, and society—in areas as diverse as broadband access, entrepreneurship, education, sustainability and the environment, political discourse, human health, and mobile devices.

The sweeping conference had the tagline, “Global technology driving local solutions.” Interesting, as that’s sort of the reverse of Xconomy’s mantra, which is reporting about local stories with global impact. But I think they’re two sides of the same innovation coin.

So, in “ESPN plays of the day” style, here’s my top 10 list from the conference (if only I had the video to go with it):

10. Setting up entrepreneurial zones. A panel led by Ty Carlson of Microsoft proposed denoting special “R&D zones” from Oregon to British Columbia geared toward supporting startups in fields like renewable energy, sustainable farming, and biotech. The idea would be to offer tax credits and other incentives to create a more entrepreneurial culture in the Northwest, especially in rural areas.

9. What government should and shouldn’t do. Investor and entrepreneur Martin Tobias of Seattle-based Kashless said, “Startups and investors can’t make a 10-year bet when you have a two-year tax credit.” Those conditions freeze out small companies, especially in costly ventures like energy. So government should create open markets and set minimum market sizes for new technologies, Tobias said. But it shouldn’t pick the technology winners themselves.

8. Northwest tech startups do the Olympics. Tom Guthrie, CEO of Seattle-based Twisted Pair Solutions, said his company has helped numerous agencies on the Olympic Peninsula inter-operate their radios—a key problem in disaster response and other scenarios. Twisted Pair, which is backed by Ignition Partners and other investors, is also working on a laser system to deliver broadband signals. Meanwhile, Paul Manson, CEO of Vancouver, BC-based Sea Breeze, talked about his company’s project to build a high-voltage, direct-current undersea cable between Victoria, BC, and Port Angeles, WA. This would be a fast, controllable power transmission component of a smart grid; it should be under construction by mid-2010, he said.

7. The world according to Dell. In a chat with Mark Anderson of Strategic News Service, Michael Dell said he is excited about China and the rest of Asia as fast-growing economies. He anticipates a U.S. recovery from the recession, but says, “I don’t think you’ll see an immediate snap-back.” And he likes South America as an emerging market (Dell does sales of more than $1 billion in Brazil alone). But Europe, not so much—he sees a lot of uncertainty in the workforce there.

6. Get ready for Dell smartphones. “Mobility is absolutely the theme,” Dell said. He was talking about the relative importance of desktop computers, laptops, netbooks, and mobile devices to …Next Page »

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The big story out of the International CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment expo in San Diego last week could perhaps be summed up in one word: “spectrum.” We also have reports from the Algae Biofuels Summit and other big news, so read on.

—Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs and his son Paul, who is now chairman and CEO of the San Diego wireless giant, told CTIA goers that Qualcomm’s labs have reached the limit in terms of optimizing the efficiencies of wireless devices within current radio bands. Yet demand continues to accelerate for mobile data services. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a different session that finding more spectrum is the agency’s No. 1 priority. “Spectrum is oxygen,” Genachowski said.

—In a report that preceded the CTIA conference, Seattle-based Ontela released a survey that shows people still have problems doing simple things like transmitting photos on their mobile phones, even as the popularity of mobile data plans and services such as text messaging continue to grow in the U.S.

—Denise gave us a preview of the 3rd Annual Algae Biomass Summit, which also was held in San Diego last week. Cleantech San Diego president Lisa Bicker said more than 625 cleantech companies are now based in the region, including more than 30 algae biofuels companies.

—At a time when investment capital has been pouring into the development of algae-based biofuels, Bill Barclay of Columbia, MD-based Martek Biosciences said it could take a decade or more for commercial-scale algae biofuels production to become reality. Scientists still need to identify the best algae strains, optimize production processes, and find the best ways to convert “green crude” to fuels.

—San Diego-based Achates Power has raised $12.1 million out of a $20 million venture round, according to a regulatory filing. The company has been developing a radical new design for a high-efficiency two-stroke automotive engine.

—We’ve been too busy to do much celebrating, but Xconomy’s San Diego website officially marked its one-year anniversary last week. In the past year, we’ve published more than 1,400 news stories, briefs, and commentaries about the innovation leaders, businesses, technologies, and trends that make up the “exponential” part of the San Diego economy. Thanks to all our readers for their great comments.

—While the Obama Administration continues to push its plans for healthcare reform, Gary West is refining his own plans for using the new San Diego-based West Wireless Health Institute to catalyze innovations in wireless health that help deliver healthcare equivalent to what’s generally available today at lower cost. The non-profit institute, which was funded in March by a $45 million donation from the Gary and Mary West Foundation, ranks as one of the first organizations in the world to seek improvements in healthcare specifically through advances in wireless technologies.

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The co-founders who introduced San Diego-based Qualcomm’s wireless digital technology in 1989 envisioned from the early days that it would be ideal for the Internet. But Irwin Jacobs says now even he’s amazed at how many things a cell phone can do today.

A new generation of innovators is now using Qualcomm’s proprietary technology to develop new cellular devices and services in such fields as healthcare, transportation, and energy—and “None of that was quite obvious to us in the early days,” Jacobs said in a presentation at a wireless conference in San Diego yesterday. Yet the Qualcomm co-founder and his son, Qualcomm chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs, also say the wireless industry is pushing the limits of cellular networks by cranking out ever-faster wireless devices that feature more and more mobile data services. Many of the new products just over the horizon are driven by Qualcomm’s own advances in technology—including 4G smartphones, netbook computers, and palm-size wireless TVs.

Rapid changes in cellular technology and the potential for network constraints became part of a wide-ranging keynote address at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment conference in San Diego. Unlike most keynotes, though, Qualcomm’s father-and-son dynasty appeared together onstage for what was intended to be a living-room discussion with CTIA president Steve Largent, the former Oklahoma Republican Congressman and Hall of Fame pro football receiver.

Irwin Jacobs

One of their most interesting revelations came while Irwin, who turns 76 later this month, was discussing the technology advances that led to the current generation of smartphones. Despite rapid technology advances, the market for mobile Web-based services was slow to develop, and Irwin observed, “The iPhone was really a major breakthrough, in terms of developing a simple interface.”

Paul added, “We always used to talk about developing the killer app, and the killer app ended up being a simple user interface,” and he says most advances in computing capabilities and graphics technologies are now focused on making the interface even simpler to use. Paul, who was named Qualcomm’s CEO in 2005 and chairman earlier this year, says he envisions a future in which wireless technologies are “increasingly embedded in everything,” enabling a homeowner to use their cell phone to remotely control their TV, stereo, and lights.

According to Irwin, wireless networks provide cellular coverage for roughly 80 percent of the world population today, and he estimates there are …Next Page »

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Perhaps the week before Easter was a good time for San Diego’s technology innovators to be taking stock. Amylin is busy weighing how best to fend off dissident investors Carl Icahn and Eastbourne Capital before next month’s annual shareholder meeting. Other San Diego startups, such as Trius Therapeutics and Sangart, are considering how best to move forward in their development of new biopharmaceutical products. So read on!

—San Diego’s Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN)  is preparing for a proxy battle with billionaire investor Carl Icahn and Eastbourne Capital Management at next month’s shareholder meeting. The two dissident shareholder groups have each nominated a slate of five candidates for the company’s 12-member board of directors, although fielding so many candidates could simply ensure that Amylin’s candidates get elected.

—San Diego wireless chipset provider Qualcomm and Verizon, one of its biggest customers, seem to be on different pages when it comes to deploying the fourth generation mobile phone technology known as LTE, for Long-Term Evolution. Verizon has said it will have LTE in 20 to 35 markets by the end of 2010. But a Qualcomm marketing director said he expects the commercialization of LTE devices won’t happen until 2012 or later.

—The venture purse strings loosened a bit last week in San Diego. Nirvanix, a startup providing “data storage in the cloud,” added $5 million in a secondary round of venture funding. Nirvanix said it previously had raised $18 million in venture funding from Intel Capital, Valhalla Partners, Mission Ventures, Windward Ventures, and the European Founders Fund. Ethertronics, which develops embedded antennas for wireless devices, got an additional $4 million in a secondary round of venture funding. A spokeswoman told me Friday that its investors include Bank of America, Sevin Rosen Funds, and Ridgewood Capital.

—In an interview last week, Trius Therapeutics CEO Jeff Stein said the biotech firm is assessing the best way to move ahead in its development of a new anti-bacterial drug. In mid-stage clinical trials, Stein told me the San Diego company’s drug candidate torezolid cured 96 percent of the patients who had nasty-looking skin infections. But to get to the next stage in clinical trials, Stein says Trius will either have to raise more venture capital or find a strategic partner.

—San Diego-based Sangart is at a crossroads in developing an oxygen-carrying compound called MP4, which is made by purifying and chemically modifying …Next Page »

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When Qualcomm co-founder and longtime chairman and CEO Irwin Jacobs stepped down as chairman of the wireless giant last month, he said he was taking another shot at retiring. Jacobs, who turned 75 in October, told The San Diego Union-Tribune after Qualcomm’s annual shareholders meeting that his first attempt at retiring didn’t take, presumably because he remained active at Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) after his son Paul succeeded him as CEO four years ago.

As a retiree, though, Jacobs has still been keeping a fairly busy schedule. In February, he gave an extended lecture at MIT’s School of Engineering on “providing chips and technology for a world with 4 billion cellular customers,” in which he provided some intriguing up-to-date industry analysis, which has been embedded at the bottom of this report. And on Friday, Jacobs was a speaker at the La Jolla Research and Innovation Summit, which was organized by Connect, the San Diego nonprofit that promotes technology innovation, as a showcase of local technology for venture investors.

“I was asked to forecast,” Jacobs told the San Diego audience, “but I must admit I’m a terrible forecaster. When I started Qualcomm in ‘85, I told my wife we might have as many as 100 employees if everything goes right.” Today Qualcomm has a global workforce of roughly 14,000 employees, including more than 9,000 in San Diego.
In discussing Qualcomm, Jacobs also steered clear of making any forecasts, although he made several interesting historical observations.

—At Qualcomm, he said, “We made a strategic decision early on that we really wanted to focus on innovation.” Because it was difficult in the beginning, however, for Qualcomm to gain market acceptance for its CDMA digital wireless technology, it became necessary for the company to make its own handsets and related cellular equipment. Once Qualcomm became established, Jacobs said, “We sold off the handset division to concentrate on the chips and software.”

—”All phones are getting smart,” Jacobs said. He held up a copy of the New York Times business section with a story headlined, “Laptops? They Are So Yesterday. Try a Netbook” and described the progression of smaller and more powerful computers from desktops to laptops and netbooks. At the same time, he noted that mobile phones are progressively getting bigger and more powerful, “So they’re going to meet in the middle, where we’re getting colliding galaxies here or something.”

—Amazon’s Kindle “will be the only way you read a book in the future,” Jacobs said. “It’s got a Qualcomm chip in it, and all the data going to Amazon goes through our data center.”

In his February lecture at MIT, Jacobs repeated one of the mantras that kept him excited during the early days at Qualcomm. “I always said we’ve got at least 10 years of excitement ahead of us, and every year of that 10 years moves out a year,”Jacobs said.

His MIT lecture is embedded below, or you can watch on MIT’s website by clicking here.

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It’s hard for any company to raise capital in this recession, but several San Diego life sciences startups disclosed last week they had done just that. A few bright spots also appeared during a local seminar on mergers and acquisitions—so let the news light your way.

—A big deal on the other side of North America last week may bear some significance for San Diego’s Anadys, which has been developing a new treatment for hepatitis C. Cambridge, MA-Vertex Pharmaceuticals said it was buying ViroChem Pharma of Laval, Quebec, for about $375 million. Vertex, which has about 200 employees in San Diego, is adding some punch to its own hepatitis C drug by acquiring ViroChem.

—Qualcomm took another step in its succession plan last week when CEO Paul Jacobs added board chairman to his title, a job that was held by his father, Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs. The San Diego wireless chipmaker also disclosed that Paul Jacobs and company president Steve Altman took 25 percent pay cuts last month when the company froze the salaries of all employees.

—In an unrelated development, Qualcomm recently acquired the key assets of Digital Fountain, a Freemont, CA, startup that has developed software to optimize digital media transmitted over any network. The assets include a team of seven engineers led by Digital Fountain’s founder and CTO.

—The lore of technology innovation is replete with stories of iconic hits and misses, of Googles and Pets.coms. Xconomy added a new chapter to the literature last week with a tale about Erwise, an Internet browser invented by four Finns before Netscape changed the online world as we know it. It also was the first Xconomy story written by Juha-Pekka Tikka, a veteran newspaper reporter from Helsinki who is Xconomy San Diego’s Innovation Journalism Fellow through June.

—Regulus Therapeutics, the Carlsbad, CA-based joint venture formed in 2007 by Alnylam (NASDAQ: ALNY) of Cambridge, MA, and Carlsbad’s Isis, got $20 million in a first step toward independence. Alynlam and Isis each contributed $10 million to Regulus, which has developing microRNA-based drugs and now intends to continue that work as an independent company.

—A new life sciences company has come to light in San Diego. Evoke Pharma has been developing a new drug treatment for diabetic gastroparesis, a gastrointestinal disorder. Evoke Pharma has been operating in stealth mode since it was founded two years ago, but a financial filing that surfaced recently shows the biotech has raised almost $12.3 million in venture funding since 2007.

—While the overall market for mergers and acquisitions remains gloomy, John Stiska of Agility Capital says he sees a few signs of encouragement. Stiska, who spoke last week at an M&A workshop in San Diego, says mid-market equity funds are still buying stable, well-run companies. And Stiska says small-to-mid-size defense contractors throughout Southern California represent ideal targets for acquisition.

—San Diego’s Optimer Pharmaceuticals, which has two antibiotics for treating diarrhea in late-stage clinical trials, raised $32.9 million in a registered direct offering to institutional investors. Optimer (NASDAQ: OPTR) says it plans to use the proceeds for ongoing drug development and general corporate purposes.

—Lou Ryan, chairman of San Diego’s St. Bernard Software (OTCBB: SBSW) has stepped in as CEO with plans to expand the company’s line of Internet-filtering network security products. I spoke with Ryan, a software industry veteran and former venture partner at Menlo Park, CA-based Sand Hill Capital, about the firm’s new strategy.

—Jay Lichter, a San Diego venture capitalist and founder of Otonomy, told Luke his goal is to someday make the specialized drug developer for hearing disorders as big as Alcon, the Swiss eye care company. One of Otonomy’s early drug candidates is aimed at Meniere’s disease, an imbalance of inner ear fluid.

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Qualcomm said today that CEO Paul Jacobs is succeeding his father, co-founder Irwin Jacobs, as chairman of the San Diego wireless giant. Irwin Jacobs, 75, started the digital wireless company with Andy Viterbi and a handful of others in 1985 and served as CEO for 20 years. He plans to remain on the board.

The transition is effective immediately, according to the company, and reflects the measured change that Qualcomm has undertaken in shifting to its next generation of leadership. Paul Jacobs, 46, was named as Qualcomm’s CEO in 2005—after heading the company’s wireless and Internet group. He joined the company in 1988, fresh from getting his doctorate in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley.

In its release, Qualcomm said Paul Jacobs has been the primary driver of Qualcomm’s focus on wireless data services and the expanding possibilities of next-generation technologies for mobile entertainment and computing and on-the-go information.

Earlier in the day, Qualcomm signaled the strength of its balance sheet by announcing the company will increase its dividend to 17 cents a share (from 16 cents) for quarterly dividends payable after March 27th.

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Constrained by legal restrictions and zealously protected by their handlers, the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are rarely enlightening when they make public appearances. But Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) CEO Paul Jacobs delivered a close approximation of candor this morning in what was billed as a keynote presentation at the Red Herring Global 100 summit, which is taking place this week in downtown San Diego. The presentation turned out to be a conversation with Red Herring publisher Alex Vieux, who began by saying he had different questions for Jacobs than the ones he had previously submitted to Qualcomm.

What I found insightful were Jacobs’ responses to questions about running a public company, which covered the gamut from the company’s evolving, less contentious intellectual property strategy to M&A plans to its R&D strategy and more (see below). In the end, Vieux observed that it’s “obviously a much bigger headache than it was five or 10 years ago.”

“I’ll tell my father that,” Jacobs responded wryly, referring to Qualcomm founder and chairman, Irwin Jacobs. Paul Jacobs started working at Qualcomm as employee No. 33 in 1988, after getting a doctorate in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley. The younger Jacobs’ work initially focused on writing software code to compress speech for digital communications systems, although he gained managerial experience overseeing new technology development. He was president of Qualcomm’s Wireless and Internet Group in 2005, when he was named to succeed his dad as CEO.

“When I got hired, the board said, ‘Oh, no one can replace Irwin,’ ” Paul Jacobs said. “We’re going to be a team. You go focus on the technology and these other guys are going to go off and focus on the licensing and IP [intellectual property]. And that just didn’t work out. You can’t do it that way.”

Vieux did not ask Jacobs how that situation had changed. But Qualcomm has engendered …Next Page »

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The economic downturn means it’s likely the wireless industry will stay with third-generation, or 3G, technologies for the foreseeable future, Qualcomm’s top executives said last night during a panel discussion.

Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said customers of the San Diego wireless giant have pushed out their chip orders for 3G technologies because of the economic downturn, but the company is looking for a business rebound in the second half of 2009. He cited the “uncertainty of consumer demand” as a key underlying issue, but Jacobs also noted that sales of 3G handsets based on Qualcomm technology have increased 25 percent over last year.

The panel discussion at Qualcomm’s corporate headquarters, in the 534-seat Irwin M. Jacobs Qualcomm Hall, was billed as a “town hall” meeting by CommNexus, the San Diego telecom industry association that organized the event. “It’s meant to disseminate ideas, share knowledge, and build networks with industry peers,” CommNexus CEO Rory Moore told the audience.

Jacobs, who was named as Qualcomm CEO in 2005, is the son of Qualcomm founder and chairman Irwin Jacobs. The second-generation CEO was joined by his second-in-command, former Sprint executive Len Lauer, who was named as Qualcomm COO in August, and by Steve Mollenkopf, who also was named in August to head the all-important QCT, Qualcomm CDMA Technologies.

So in a way, the event featured the 2.5G version of Qualcomm management discussing 3G technologies and the prospects for 4G products and services.

But for all the discussion about digital wireless technology, the Qualcomm chips in the Blackberry Storm and Qualcomm software in Google’s Android operating system, about USB dongles, and LTE versus WiMax, what may have been the most interesting question didn’t come until the end.

“What do people misunderstand about Qualcomm?” asked Iain Gillott, the wireless industry expert who was recruited as moderator for event.

“From a PR point of view, I think the way we are most misunderstood is from the newspaper headlines and everyone attacking our licensing model,” said Lauer, referring to industry complaints about the high cost of Qualcomm’s licensing deals. “What they miss underneath that is all of the innovation and research and development we do… opening mobile radios to new apps and services.”

CEO Jacobs added that because of Qualcomm’s patent lawsuits against Nokia and Broadcom, “You think this is a litigious company, but we did not go out and sue everyone first… Our (business) model is built around licensing. We have one of the broadest models. We don’t sell cell phones to end users. We work with partners. We consciously developed this strategy of working through partners and we go to our partners and say we’re here to be a good partner with you.”

It was an interesting moment of executive self-reflection, especially since a federal appellate court last week upheld most of a lower court’s findings against Qualcomm in a patent dispute dating to 2003. The court found substantial evidence that Qualcomm had deliberately withheld its proprietary video compression technology from a standard-setting industry group, a move that left room for Qualcomm to later file a patent-infringement lawsuit against Broadcom, a rival chipmaker in Irvine, CA.

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As the CDG North America Regional Conference convenes in San Diego today, Perry LaForge, the trade association’s chief executive, says he has a lot to feel good about.

LaForge says he started working on behalf of CDMA, or code-division multiple access, after getting a preview of the wireless technology in 1988, when San Diego’s Qualcomm was barely three years old. It wasn’t until 1989 that Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs actually demonstrated his concept to the telecommunications industry.

“I pulled together the initial carrier consortium,” says LaForge. “I worked with the Japanese and Koreans… We convinced Samsung and LG to produce cell phones based on CDMA.”

LaForge’s has a bigger and more formal role now as head of the CDG, the CDMA Development Group. Looking back over the past 20 years, he says, “I think we have fundamentally changed the wireless landscape…We fundamentally changed an industry” that had already committed to a rival wireless technical standard. “It’s something that I take a great deal of pride in.”

The CDG represents roughly 100 leading CDMA operators and wireless equipment manufacturers. Yet as several hundred people gather for the two-day conference, industry questions about the viability of CDMA still seem to linger.

Even though Qualcomm ranks today as the world’s second-biggest maker of wireless chips, the rival GSM Association (for Global Systems Mobile communications) says 82 percent of the global market for mobile devices is based on its digital technology standard.

Despite GSM’s global dominance, and a broader migration to next-generation GSM technologies, LaForge maintains that CDMA operators continue to upgrade their networks to provide capacity for escalating voice and bandwidth-intensive data traffic

“There’s a lot of talk about 4G systems, but one thing I suspect is that when there are economic downturns that people tend to hunker down with the systems they have,” LaForge says. CDG members also have worked aggressively to reduce costs, getting the cost of CDMA handsets below $30 apiece, LaForge says.

The global economic downturn became apparent at Qualcomm earlier this month when the chip maker reported a 22 percent drop in profit in the quarter that ended in September.

Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs told analysts last week that in the face of slowing demand, the company has stopped developing a next-generation wireless technology called Ultra Mobile Broadband, or UMB. Jacobs says the chip maker will put its resources into another high-speed technology called Long Term Evolution that Verizon Wirelss and other major customers have backed.

Jacobs indicated, though, that he expects the wireless industry to go through a pause, rather than a downturn, amid the broader financial crisis—a sentiment that LaForge echoed in our conversation yesterday.

“The macro-economic environment obviously impacts a lot of different sectors,” LaForge said. “But a lot of folks believe that the wireless industry in general will probably fare better than other sectors.”

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Irwin Jacobs is the chairman and founder of Qualcomm, the San Diego-based giant in digital wireless communications. With sales of more than $10 billion a year, Qualcomm now has a market valuation of roughly $66 billion—more than McDonald’s.

Yet Jacobs, who will celebrate his 75th birthday later this month, seemed remarkably unpretentious for a wireless industry tycoon when he appeared at a recent UC San Diego event. He was the main attraction at the Oct. 1 kickoff for UCSD’s 3rd Annual Entrepreneur Challenge. The yearlong challenge is run by UCSD students, and combines a series of campus-wide entrepreneurial competitions, educational workshops and social events.

Jacobs, who moved to San Diego from MIT almost 50 years ago, still comes across like a professor of electrical engineering, which is how he began his career, and makes self-deprecating comments about his New England accent.

“I still say pahrk the cahr in the gahrage,” Jacobs said to the amusement of more than 300 UCSD students and others.

The San Diego billionaire also arrived by himself and mingled with students before and after the evening event. Another sign of Jacobs’ sensibility was his willingness to tell his life story, which he no doubt has recounted many times before.

What came through his talk, though, was his inherent curiosity and ability to learn deeply about new subjects. He told one anecdote about learning everything he could about the military specifications that were holding up a government contract, to the point where he identified conflicting standards among various specs cited by government program managers.

His advice to entrepreneurs in the audience included:

—In creating a technology business, “you have a technology side, a financial side and a sales and marketing side, and you really have to make sure that you have all three of those in alignment before you go forward.”

—”As you become more successful, you have to keep running fast. If you develop a good product, you can’t just sit on it — other people will run right by you.”

—”One of the key items of course is to have a lot of persistence. Whatever your (cost) estimates are, you’re going to be off at least by a factor of two.”

Jacobs compared managing an executive team to managing his engineering graduate students, saying, “you kind of have to explain to senior executives what it is you want them to do and then let them go off and do their own thing.”

At the same time, Jacobs says it becomes necessary as a startup expands to develop processes for accounting, project management, purchasing, and other business tasks. But even that seemed comparable to university life for Jacobs.

“It reminded me of working on committees at a university” he said. “The main difference is that you can make a decision when you’re in business.”

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It’s a curious thing, when a major public research university commissions an independent study to assess its economic impact, especially when we’re talking about an individual school in the University of California system. In this case, the University of California, San Diego, hired a consulting firm in San Francisco to remind the public just how big and important it really is.

The study, released by university officials yesterday, dutifully reported that UCSD contributes more than $7.2 billion a year to the California economy. The full report is available here.

When asked why the university launched the study, UC San Diego Chancellor Marye Anne Fox told reporters who gathered for the announcement that it was intended for campus planning purposes and was commissioned “about a year ago.” That was roughly the same time when allegations of academic misconduct were flying at the Preuss School, a tuition-free charter school on UCSD’s campus for poor and minority students.

The turmoil at the Preuss school erupted as a statewide furor over undisclosed pay for UC administrators was finally subsiding, a controversy that included UCSD’s Fox.

But none of that was dredged up again at the press event.

Fox explained that UCSD paid $130,000 for a report that was more independent and provided a more detailed analysis than UCSD had obtained from previous internal studies. Whatever the rationalization, the 98-page study by CBRE Consultants yielded insights on the economic ripple effects of UCSD’s role as a hotbed for new technologies.

The study reported that UCSD faculty and alumni have started at least 193 companies, a conservative estimate, and that 67 remain “independent and operational” in the state today. Those companies now generate more than $10 billion in annual sales, with Qualcomm accounting for $8.8 billion of the total. The San Diego wireless giant was founded by former UCSD engineering professor Irwin Jacobs.

Using economic multipliers, the study found that startups coming out of UCSD have created 129,570 jobs and generate more than $37 billion a year in direct and indirect spending and personal income.

UCSD alumnus Steven R. Hart, co-founder of San Diego-based satellite and digital-communications firm ViaSat (NASDAQ: VSAT), may have provided the most succinct commentary, though. In light of the financial crisis that has been dominating the news, Hart said, “I can’t help but think about the type of entrepreneurialism that goes on around a university and the type of innovation that takes place in the financial sector. We’re not thinking of new ways to leverage debt and develop new types of mortgage-backed securities.”

Hart, a mathematician, explained afterward that the innovation in and around universities is instead focused primarily on advances in new technologies and products, from satellite transmitters and terminals to molecular biology.

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