Virginia Tech President Charles Steger watches a presentation by Brian Warner, who is working on a new research partnership between Virginia Tech, UVa, Rolls Royce, and other businesses.
Virginia Tech played host to a handful of state decision-makers Monday as a subcommittee of Gov. Bob McDonnell’s commission on higher education, reform, innovation and investment considered business and research models in place at Tech and in the region.
The subcommittee for regional strategies and partnerships for research and economic development spent the day at Tech’s Corporate Research Center hearing presentations on how the CRC operates in tandem with Tech.
Topics of the presentations also covered a tutorial on federal funding and ideas on how to collaborate with other public and private universities along with partners in industry to attract federal and private funding for research and development.
The subcommittee, which consists of thirteen members of the commission including Tech president Charles Steger, is charged with the goals of increasing private and federal research funding to Virginia colleges and universities, developing energy-related research projects, promoting regional economic development and workforce training, and developing new public-private research funding partnerships.
The subcommittee is one of three that are all directed toward implementing McDonnell’s Executive Order No. 9, which established the commission in March in an effort to increase the quality of the state’s higher education system.
During his welcome and presentation to the subcommittee, Steger acknowledged that while the research partnership between Tech and the CRC is a strong private-public model, Virginia overall does not have comparative amounts of funding coming to research as other states do.
“Virginia is lagging behind,” he said. “...We lag behind other states in terms of funding.”
He cited Tech’s current National Science Foundation of the 46th research institution in terms of expenditure based on 2008 numbers. Last year, based on 2007 numbers, Tech ranked number 42.
Tech, however, is currently investing in research facilities not just in the CRC but also across the state. Steger cited the new national capital region research institutes in Northern Virginia, the institute for advanced learning and research in Southside Virginia that includes a new tire research center and the new National Institute of Aerospace facility in Hampton, of which Tech is a partner, as examples of other areas where Tech is investing in research.
The subcommittee examined ideas about universities collaborating with one another as well as with independent businesses in research expansion as it learned about how the CRC operates as well as the many projects Tech is currently fostering in Southside Virginia.
The model of Tech’s CRC, which is a subsidiary of the Virginia Tech Foundation, could be somewhat mimicked near other universities, said Jim Flowers, director of Virginia Tech KnowledgeWorks, but not every detail could be reproduced because of the unique nature of entrepreneurs who establish businesses at the CRC, many of whom are Tech graduates.
Bob Walters, vice president for research at Tech, spoke during his presentation about intellectual property about the “valley of death” that many companies experience.
The “valley of death” is the time that many companies lose funding between conducting pure research and marketing its product. One of the goals of the subcommittee, aside from fostering new research partnerships in the state, is to help companies avoid the “valley of death” and promote industry and small businesses.
The subcommittee also considered the idea of developing jobs in Southside Virginia in the Danville area. Tech is currently collaborating with the institute for advanced learning and research and Southside economic development.
The subcommittee also heard presentations on attracting federal research and development grants and the creation of new partnerships between state universities and Rolls-Royce in a planned research facility near the University of Virginia.
The subcommittee next meets on Sept. 8 in Harrisonburg.
The entire commission will meet again on Oct. 12 in Richmond.
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