When and why was the Office of Economic Development created?
The University officially created it about ... two years ago and the impetus for it was goals that were established as part of the restructuring initiative ... The University in addition to Virginia Tech and William & Mary went to the state for additional autonomy in finance, financial and administrative areas ... The state in return asked that they meet 12 goals and those ranged kind of all over the place from ensuring access to ensuring quality to an increase in research dollars just to make sure that we maintained ties to the state. Well, one of those 12 goals was economic development, and I think it was felt that it was important to have somebody that was paying attention to that all the time. It doesn’t mean we weren’t doing it in the past; it just was probably hard to fill out to different people’s jobs and this brought it into greater focus.
What are the other goals and other missions of the Office of Economic Development?
Our main goal is to link the assets of the University with communities and companies to address their economic development needs — in a nutshell, that’s what we do. And that can happen in lots of ways. If you’ve visited the Web site, you’ve probably seen kind of lots of different projects and programs. We want to be good partners with the local community, with the state as a whole and we also, as part of restructuring, [are] committed to partnering with a lag area or a lag region ... that [fell behind] in things like employment, income, maybe education. And since we have ... U.Va,’s College at Wise ... we decided that made sense for us to choose a seven-county southwest Virginia area as our partner in that.
How does the Office of Economic Development go about fulfilling those goals?
Thinking specifically about companies and sort of a traditional economic development model, you can attract companies to an area, you can support the ones that are currently here and help them grow or at least keep them profitable or you can grow your own ... Supporting faculty entrepreneurship is one way that we do that. ... Statewide, there’s something called the Virginia Economic Development Partnership and [it is] the state’s recruiting arm to bring in jobs to Virginia and, locally there’s something called the Thomas Jefferson Partnership for Economic Development and [it does] the same thing on a regional basis. I think they have somewhere between five and seven counties that are part of that. So one example of how we work with them is ... we recently worked with the state and Virginia Tech to recruit Rolls-Royce to Virginia ... so that’s kind of a new model that helps people see how universities and economic development work together. Our relationship with Virginia Tech was a big draw for Rolls-Royce and helping them decide to land their jet engine facility in Petersburg, [Va.] So they want access to highly trained workers and they want access to research. They don’t really have a large [internal research and development program], they work with the universities to get that ... And, the trend lately has been to outsource more of that because it’s very expensive to keep scientists ... on-staff and support the facilities so now companies are finding that if they can tap into that through universities or small start-ups, then that’s a better way for them to go. So, everybody got something out of this deal. The state got Rolls-Royce to come to Virginia and bring some really good-quality, high-paying jobs. Rolls-Royce gets access to the research at the ... Engineering [School] here at U.Va., the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech and the [University’s] ... Commerce [School]. And there’s money for sponsored research, there’s money for student internships, there’s money for faculty members. All those things are ways that the University certainly can grow and improve so everybody won on that deal.
What are your duties as director of economic development?
I think probably, most concisely, just to serve as [the University’s] primary point of contact for economic development-related matters and that’s, you know, with community groups and corporate groups ... We work with the county of Albemarle, we work with the Small Business Development Center. So any of those groups that — the Chamber of Commerce — any of those groups that want to partner with the University, I can help them get to the places they need. And the same with companies, if the companies want to hire students, I can point them in the direction of career services. If they want to sponsor some research in a particular area, I can help them find the right faculty member. If they want to get some advice on how to run their business, we can direct them to the ... Commerce [School] or the Darden ... School ... both of which have executive education programs and consulting faculty to assist with things like that.
How does the Office of Economic Development go about creating and facilitating research projects as well as community and industry partnerships?
...What we do is really develop relationships with the groups that can put these pieces together — so knowing the people, knowing the agencies or the resources, having a good idea of what we have to offer at the University and knowing what else is out there in the state, the region, the country and making sure we’re clear on what each group’s goals are so that as we move forward in a partnership everybody is getting something out of it, because that’s really critical to any successful collaboration.
Could you please tell me about the T100 Alumni Mentoring Program?
This is a pretty neat program and it’s ... unique. We’ve been looking and we haven’t found another program like it in the U.S. It was the idea of ... an [alumnus] named George McCabe who recognized that there were a lot of young alums out there like himself that had achieved a certain measure of success in the technology world and that they wanted to give back to the University and in ways that involved more than just writing a check, and so what we are able to do through his leadership is put together teams around faculty startups so these could involve alumni [who] are lawyers, marketing people, [and venture capitalists] to help them find money ... And this group of three to five mentors gets together with the faculty startup once a month and they have an hour-long conference call and they talk through the issues, they talk through the goals of the company. They help them identify next steps and what they need to do, what milestones they need to achieve to keep their company moving forward and they serve as sort of a pre-board of directors as these companies are getting up and running and advice — a source of advice — a sounding board. They open their Rolodexes, they’ve provided a number of valuable connections. They review documents, they just really do an extraordinary amount for these companies in addition to donating $3,000 to the program, which we then turn back to the company in the form of grants to help them do things like set up a Web site or if they need to hire somebody to do a marketing analysis ... they as a group decide is needed to get them to the next step.
Could you please describe the partnership with the Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority?
[It is] the agency in Southwest Virginia that we work closely with to make sure that we’re working on the right projects that are going to be of value to the community and make sure they’re in line with what’s already happening ... We were sort of starting from scratch, there [were] just a few lines in the legislation talking about stimulating economic development so it was quite broad. And as a result of the number of focus groups, interviews and visits with key leaders in the area we came up with three focus areas that we thought made sense based on what we heard the needs were and based on what we were able to offer as a university. So one was access to health care, one was K-12 support and the third was business support. And, you know, at first glance some people may wonder how access to health care is related to economic development, and if you look at the old model where it’s just about creating jobs, it is hard to see that connection. But when you think about what the employers really need when they’re considering establishing a base in a region or expanding their operation, they need healthy workers ... [An organization called] Remote Area Medical Clinic [goes] all over the world. They go to jungles of Africa and South America and bring in a team of doctors and nurses for a finite period of time, whether it’s a couple days or weeks and provide health care. Well, they’ve been doing that in Wise for six or seven years at the Wise County Fair Grounds and it’s amazing to see the number of people that come the night before. They spend the night in their cars so that they can get in line to see a doctor or a dentist. VCU brings up a big team of dentists, we send a big team of doctors and nurses, there [are] a number of other groups that contribute and volunteer that effort. And I think we all recognize that while that was that was very valuable work and extremely appreciated, it was really just a Band-Aid and to help provide additional access, you know, throughout the year, not just for a weekend in July. We’ve been exploring ways that we can really extend our health services to that area. [Pediatrics Prof.] Karen Rheuban has been working with telemedicine efforts in that area for years and years and years. Our pediatric group, our neurology group have been seeing patients in that area at speciality clinics for decades. And so we’re trying to figure out what other models we can use because telemedicine is great but having in-face person-to-person contact is obviously ideal. So we’ve started through the help of some funding from the President’s Office and also some funding that we’ve received from the Tobacco Commission ... So this is just getting started, and the idea is for these to come down three or four times a year. The doctors would see the patients, do a lot of screening, help train some of the workers in the area to do some of the procedures and really kind of build the capacity in that area and then follow up with the patients in between visits in telemedicine. And working with local doctors, a lot of them are general practitioners who do things called tumor boards where the doctors can get together via a satellite link and look at X-rays together and look at MRIs, talk about what pathology slides revealed and make recommendations about treatment. So it’s not just about bringing them all up to Charlottesville to get treated, which is what happens with a lot of the patients, but to help, you know, build the infrastructure in the area that people can get served in their region and just continue providing whatever support and expertise that we have that we can.
What are some of the University’s most recent start-up enterprises and companies?
There are a couple that might be [of] interest. The one that’s gotten a lot of press lately is a company called Adenosine Therapeutics, and that’s not a new startup, but the reason people are excited about it is because it’s a very successful startup, and the success rate is not great for any new ventures I think, it’s between 40 and 70 percent for any new business not necessarily tied to a university. This is a company that’s been around for a number of years. It’s based on the research of faculty members at U.Va. and [it was] recently bought by a company called Clinical Data, which is a global biotech firm. It’s a good model because over the years as the company was ramping up, [it] used knowledge that was created in the labs at U.Va., went into the company where [employees] were developing real-world applications for extending this out in the community — they were taking the information they got during that application process to then feed back into the lab. It was sort of a circle, an iterative circle between the basic research happening in the lab and the implied research happening in the company. And over the years, Adenosine sponsored more than a million dollars worth of research at U.Va. and have a number of licenses from the University, so it’s a nice circular iterative process, which we like to see.
...One of my favorites is PluroGen, which was started by [Plastic Surgery Profs.] Adam Katz ... and George Rodeheaver ... They have both developed a product ... [that is] a topical antimicrobial cream. They’ve been using their own concoction on patients for years in the burn unit and they found that it really did a nice job of healing the skin better than anything else they could find on the market. And at some point somebody decided that maybe they ought to be looking into commercializing this so it could be available more broadly ...
Is there anything else that you would like to add?
I guess something that we sort of started with ... combining forces and looking at new ways of partnering with communities and companies, not just to help them, but to help us. We learn a lot as we’re doing this. Again, it reinforces our knowledge, it creates new knowledge and it helps both parties. ... I think the communities are really starting to realize that universities are a great asset. Just by sort of sitting here we contribute to the Charlottesville [Metropolitan Statistical Area], ... through paychecks, the payroll, it’s through paying for the construction of new facilities, visitors who come in who spend money at the restaurants, the shops, hotels — that’s sort of half of it, that sort of is just the impact based on being here. But the economic development piece is a much more proactive, directed approach and the people like [at] Rolls-Royce [who] are very interested in cutting-edge technology and research that’s coming out of the universities are looking at universities in a new way. And I think economic developers across Virginia and across the country are looking at universities in different ways as a real partner and working with companies. It used to be about, you know where can you find the cheapest land, where can you find the cheapest labor so that traditional manufacturing companies could be profitable. That’s no longer the model; it’s really more about helping the companies find high-skilled workers and access to cutting-edge knowledge. They’re going to base their decisions on where to locate or expand based on how easily they can access that and so I think people are recognizing that higher [education] can be a really critical asset in attracting new investment.
Conducted by Stephanie Kassab
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