LANSING – While many have said they expect the University Research Corridor to soar to new heights with Jeff Mason at the helm as its first executive director, that talk, and even a challenging economy, hasn’t rattled him, he said in an interview on Friday.
“I don’t really look at the expectations as pressure,” said Mason, now the senior vice president at the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. “It’s a tremendous opportunity. At the MEDC, there’s been a lot of pressure with the economy and at the corridor, there will be opportunities to build off success that has already occurred and take it to the next level.”
The URC is an alliance between Michigan State University, the University of Michigan and Wayne State University, leveraging each other’s intellectual capital “to attract businesses and find research activity that feeds new enterprise, educates the workforce and plants the seeds for the new industries of tomorrow,” according to Michigan State University’s Office of Governmental Affairs.
As for what he will actually be doing as the new director, while Mason said his job will not entail “lobbying” for the URC, he said it will mean facilitating and enabling communications between the three universities involved and business leaders and using his position to articulate the value of the URC if needed, leaving the lobbying up to each one of the institution’s governmental affairs teams.
Mason, who will be the first executive director of the corridor, will start on July 6. While he’ll spend his first week like many people in any new job, getting to know his new office (which will be in downtown Lansing in the Stadium District Building) and of course, his colleagues and boss, he said he’s also prepared to shadow a few researchers to help him fill in some blanks, since with a background in business and economics and not science, one might say he’s a little shy of a doctorate in rocket science.
“I will surround myself with people who can strengthen the areas I’m maybe not so strong in,” he said, laughing in answer to a question as to whether he would consider himself a scientist.
It will likely become vital for Mason to get a quick education in the sciences, since of the careers the URC helps to foster about 75 percent of life sciences are in biological fields; another 18 percent are medical and 7 percent are related to research and development or to the processes in the agriculture field.
But just as he plans to be the student, Mason also plans to pass on a thing or two about his business acumen to his colleagues, saying that he thinks his broad range of economic development and state government experiences are likely one of the reasons he was chosen for the position.
One lesson he’s learned that he hopes he can share with URC leadership is the importance of remaining diversified economically.
He said other states, such as North Carolina and Pennsylvania, have been examples for Michigan that it can’t rely on a single sector of the economy for its base, no matter what the industry is.
As an economist, he was in a unique position to see the damage from too little diversification, Mason said, but by being a part of three major universities, he is in the equally unique situation of taking that experience and drawing from it by leveraging the universities’ strengths.
He said universities have “two golden opportunities” in that they can spin out ideas with research and innovation, and they can also attract companies with brain power either through students or faculty, which Michigan has seen recently in the location of Google in Ann Arbor and IBM in Lansing.
As for how the Corridor can help get more businesses working with the universities, Mason said he hopes to develop an easier way for companies to access the research and development that the URC does each year, saving business owners time and money by not having to perform the work themselves.
Perhaps he’ll use a UM business engagement center that’s already up and running as a model or he may simply use an interactive Internet site, he said, but either way, he said it’s important for business owners to feel as if they can partner with the URC to build on the assets the universities have to offer.
In terms of how or even if the URC could help the state as it struggles with an identify crisis in the midst of General Motors’ and Chrysler’s bankruptcy, Mason said manufacturing will continue at some level because it is in the state’s DNA, but that those who wish to press on in the field and find jobs in big corporations are probably better served by programs meant for that purpose, rather than the URC, which has the purpose of helping startups.
While manufacturing is a part of the equation at the Corridor, for example medical product manufacturing is included in the life sciences, it is invested in at a much smaller rate than other technologies, Mason said, adding that the level of investment in no way equals the amount of importance of an idea.
He said he views everything the state does for manufacturing as a puzzle and what the URC does as a very small part. There are those that want to and have branched out and started their own research-based manufacturing firms and they may belong at the Corridor. However, a larger piece of the puzzle, one that is doing its job well in his estimation, are programs such as No Worker Left Behind and Michigan Works!, which are designed to re-train or re-employ displaced manufacturing workers.
With talk of bankruptcies, the mind necessarily wanders to the economic fallout and that it could temper Mason’s goals for his new endeavor but as it happens, that’s not exactly the case.
Not only does he hope to build on the current success of the URC and position it alongside prestigious research centers such as Silicon Valley in California and Carnegie Mellon near Pittsburgh, but he also plans to take Michigan’s Research Center global.
First things first, however, Mason also hopes to surpass last year’s research and development spending of $1.3 billion, about 75 percent of which was federal money.
He said even though the state and federal government have fallen on hard times, he believes leaders when they say they are committed to universities as a “long term tool to success.”
Though Mason does appear to be a man on a mission, he isn’t planning on going it alone.
“I don’t come on the job thinking I or anyone can change the world alone,” he said. “Collectively, we can move the needle.”
This story was provided by Gongwer News Service. To subscribe, click on Gongwer.Com
a>>
