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2000 Maryland Technology Showcase Let me
say from the outset that it’s a thrill to be here. The Tech Showcase is an event
that confirms my deepest conviction about the powers of collaboration. There are friends and colleagues
here who are partners in efforts that will put Maryland at the top of the high
tech list—not just as a player, but as a leader. Here
we all are … demonstrating to each other that Maryland excels in the
development of the technologies of our time. Here we are … corporate powerhouses, innovative start-ups, state and local
governments … anxious to produce a rich climate for the new economy
… and the universities … pouring out ideas and professionals to
support everyone's most ambitious plans. I
want to set before you this morning a view of our prospects that is intended to
fuel your sense of possibility and hopefully encourage lifting your horizon
– our horizon. In this state
we have all the pieces to become a great region. The opportunity is ours. Our challenge is to set the course through our leadership so
that we will catch the golden ring and not let it slip through our
fingers. The choice is ours. Even
with the downturn in the stock market most agree that an economic revolution is taking place. The shift from the manufacturing economy to the
Knowledge Economy, driven by advances in communications and information
technology, is well underway. An
economy based on knowledge and information—things we can neither see nor
touch—is very quickly replacing the one based on resources like land,
gold and oil. Everywhere we
look the evidence is there:
The
three most important new technology sectors—infotech, biotech and nanotech—are
developing right here in Maryland.
These three words had essentially no meaning less than 20 years
ago. Now they are shorthand for
enterprises that cover everything from wireless communication to genetic coding
and micromachines. Maryland
has tremendous advantages in the technology race. In the recent Milken
Institute's New Economy study,
Maryland’s rankings among the 50 states are remarkable:
In
fact, Maryland has been identified as the second fastest growing infocom area
in the nation! The 2000
Inc. 500 ranks the region 1st
in the number of the fastest growing companies for the third year in a
row. And Fortune Magazine 2000 lifted the greater region to 4th in its Best
Cities for Business, up from 12th
in both 1998 and 1999. There
are solid objective reasons for our high rankings, and many of them are
represented here today. First,
entrepreneurial companies are laying the foundation for the Knowledge Economy in
Maryland. Second, there are 45
Federal facilities and laboratories in Maryland that provide resources and
expertise in wide-ranging areas—from NASA to the USDA, to NIH and the
FDA. We should thank our stars,
and a few others on the ground, for the unfair advantage they give the region. The
state of Maryland has also made a commitment to create an environment where
technology businesses can succeed.
The state leadership has committed to making Maryland “the”
technology state. This
underpinning is critical to nurturing the volatile world of start-ups,
competition and corporate bottom lines.
This technology showcase, programs like TEDCO, eMaryland (the
state’s electronic business initiative that will be demonstrated later
today) and MAITI
(which is a state-wide collaboration led by the University of Maryland that
will double the number of IT graduates) are a few examples of programs that are
putting financial and intellectual resources to work in support of
Maryland’s high-tech business development. And,
not least, I should add—though probably least understood—is the
contribution of the state’s research universities to the creation of a
high technology state. We have
very strong, and potentially dominant, research universities in the University
of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland at Baltimore,
and UMBC. My task today is
to convince you that the research university is an essential player if Maryland is to succeed to lead in the Knowledge
Economy. In fact, every
study of successful entrepreneurial
clusters in this country underscores the necessity of principal participation
of research universities in that achievement. With
our considerable resources, what do we need to do to be recognized as a
national high-tech leader?
To answer this question I offer you a ride with me on a balloon where we
will climb up, say to about 150,000 feet so that we can look down on our region
and a few other regions around the country too. I call this the 150,000-foot view. When you get up about 150,000 feet and then look down you
get a pretty clear overview of what’s happening on Earth below. It’s a pretty “big
picture,” part of what I like to call higher education. Let’s
start with a look at everyone’s favorite spot, Silicon Valley, California. From 150,000 feet you see pretty much
of what everybody wants to copy and a few things you really don’t want at
all. In fact, in 1998, Newsweek identified
“Hot New Tech Cities,” that were all hoping to usurp Silicon
Valley’s dominant position in the new economy. That’s probably not going to happen anytime soon. There’s a lot of history there, a
lot of momentum. There are more
than 2,000 tech firms located around technology giants (like Hewlett Packard,
Cisco, Intel, IBM, SUN, et alia) and there is an extraordinary concentration of
smart venture capital firms and collaborations and partnerships with Stanford,
UC-Berkeley, UC-San Francisco and other universities. The culture is competitive, intense,
entrepreneurial and very high rpm.
Our view from 150,000 feet is more or less shared by everyone around the
world. We
all know that Silicon Valley owes much to Frederick Terman, a Stanford
Electrical Engineering
faculty member who, over 50 years ago, brought federal research dollars to
Stanford to support research projects in the budding area of electronics. It was Terman who, after World War II,
launched SRI, the Stanford Research Institute, the first high-tech industrial
park, on Stanford land. It was
Terman who, as provost at Stanford, expanded the area’s interests into
biotechnology and medicine, transistors and semiconductors, and who built the
links between industry and university research and training. The
model of Silicon Valley is an important one, and its lessons are
compelling. From 150,000 feet, we
see the connections—literal ones, like infrastructure, and figurative
ones like research partnerships, a trained and tuned-in workforce, and an
entrepreneurial culture that is as strong as our political one. It’s an area that thrives, like
Terman did, on intellectual energy, competition and on the risks necessary to
stay on top. It has been
pronounced dead more than once since it was founded in 1955. It’s an area where the
universities are partners and players in developing the culture and the economy of the
region. As
our balloon trajectory takes us eastward, we look down on Massachusetts, where
the Route 128 corridor flows out from MIT and Harvard giving us a different
view from that of the Silicon Valley.
From 150,000 feet we see a high technology success story fuelled by
federally sponsored research. We
also see a vibrant, innovative, energetic, entrepreneurial culture deriving
from those two universities and others.
If Fred Terman had stayed at MIT after earning his doctorate there in
1924, the history of both California and Massachusetts might have been very
different today. A
little to our south our 150,000 foot view of the Research Triangle, anchored by
Duke, UNC and NC State, shows another concentration of computer and
communications industries, many of them located in the university research park
at NC State. The reputation of
that region has been built as much on careful positioning as on the scope of
its economic development. But
nonetheless we all have a vision of the Triangle. And
finally, from 150,000 feet up, let’s take a look at ourselves. Not surprisingly, Maryland compares
very favorably in assets to the Research Triangle area, Boston’s Route
128 Corridor, and technology development around Austin—another
university-driven center of high-tech. Have a look for yourself. Around Baltimore, with Johns Hopkins—one of the finest
medical research centers in the world, we find Lucent Technologies, the
Aberdeen Proving Ground, University of Maryland, Baltimore, Northrop Grumman,
APL, UMBC, and NSA. The I-270
corridor and I-95 provide a wide swathe of information technology and
biotechnology industry, including big players like Comsat, Hughes,
Lockheed-Martin, Celera Genomics, MedImmune, Human Genome Sciences, CSC, and
Digex, down the center of the picture. And
the University of Maryland, College Park, NASA, FDA, USDA, NIH, and NIST anchor
the southern sphere. And although this is a Maryland tech showcase, let's not
forget the value added by the action in Northern Virginia. We ignore Virginia
at our peril because these days economic pictures know no borders be they
regional, state or national. I
hope this picture is filling in for us here for this growth has been
remarkable. But how do we look
from 150,000 feet? Do we project
the image of a Silicon Valley, Route 128 or Research Triangle as a high rpm,
entrepreneurial and connected region?
Most people would say … probably not. We do not project ourselves as a connected region where the
power of our nationally ranked research universities has been utilized fully in
the development of the state’s economy. Research
universities power the Knowledge Economy in the same way that electricity
powers the industrial economy. They are an enabling resource that serves three
critical functions:
It
is these functions that separate the great regions I mentioned earlier from the
many good ones. It is these
qualities that are necessary for an entrepreneurial culture to flourish in
Maryland over the long term and especially through the inevitable transitions
in the “hot” technology cycles. Let
me give you a few examples of the ways that a great research university
partners in the developing high tech economy. Many of you here know that the infotech industry would not
even exist today if it weren’t for university research. A recent presidential commission report
stated, “Everything from the microchip to the Internet can be traced to
fundamental university research bankrolled by the federal government years
ago.” The report
recommended that the federal government double it’s funding of university
research in information technology over the next five years. Just this fall, we at Maryland received
a grant of $9.5 million of a $90 million NSF fund created to support the most
advanced IT research in the country.
And that funding impacts research areas from engineering to computer science
to geography to social sciences. University
research continues to provide the technological advances that drive the
industry’s growth. For instance, more than a year ago Professor Chia-Hung
Yang in our Department of Electrical Engineering created the world’s
smallest transistor, the key building block of electronic devices. Yang’s
transistor is 10 nanometers across.
Two of his transistors, side-by-side, span the diameter of an oxygen
molecule. One hundred thousand of
them would span the width of a human hair. This transistor will take years to reach the market, but
when it does it will revolutionize everything from communications to
bioengineering—and yet he and his colleagues and his competitors will be
working on something smaller, and faster, and cheaper. Count on it. In
addition to the IT funding, this fall the National Science Foundation has just
awarded the university another $10 million for research into new
materials. Our Materials Research
Science and Education Center is the area hotbed of nanotechnology
research. We have scientists
studying the minutest effects of electron migration on the surface of molecules
to understand how that phenomenon can be harnessed and applied to functioning
machines—at the nanoscale. If
that is too long-term, too blue sky consider Professor Venky Venkatesan, who is
commercializing a scanning SQUID microscope that was created in our Center for
Superconductivity Research. This machine, called the MAGMA C-1, measures
extremely weak magnetic fields, making it a valuable tool for failure detection
in the semiconductor industry. His
firm, Neocera, may be the foundation of a new industrial base for Maryland in
the semiconductor market. I should
note that a Maryland faculty member, Fred Wellstood invented this microscope
and received an R&D 100 Award this year for it. The Chicago
Tribune calls
them the Oscars of Invention. Or
consider Jeong Kim, who was named Entrepreneur of the Year at this event last
year. He's a Maryland alumnus who founded Yuri Systems close to the University
of Maryland campus because he valued the proximity of cutting-edge research and
top people. When Yuri was acquired
by Lucent, Dr. Kim took the lead for Lucent in optical communications—a
field where Maryland has the opportunity to take the lead nationwide. A
couple of weeks ago, the Daily Record carried an article about one
of the
University of Maryland’s incubator companies, NeuralStem Pharmaceuticals,
Inc. The state of Maryland
committed $500,000 in seed money at a crucial point that enabled NeuralStem to
go on to capitalize an important bioscience initiative to the tune of $14
million dollars. The company will
soon be leaving our incubator with a staff of 22 to become another of Maryland's
cutting-edge biotech firms. These
examples give you a glimpse of the essential and varied manner by which
research universities participate in the development of the economy of the
state. You’ll note that
it’s considerably more than workforce development. With
due respect to the infocom industry and its key position today, this new
century belongs to biology and biotechnology. There is a thriving biotechnology
industry here in Maryland. Biotech
needs universities more than infocomm does, because bioscience is a very
expensive and long-term endeavor.
It requires teams of exceptionally well-educated and well-trained
researchers, and state of the art laboratory facilities. I
have made a commitment to strengthen College Park’s national position in
biosciences, not only in biology and biochemistry, but also by building on our
nationally ranked programs in engineering, computer science, mathematics,
physics, agriculture and psychology. Research in the biosciences now goes far
beyond biology and medicine. Most
bioscience research is not done in medical schools. We bring strengths in computational biology, bioinformatics,
bioengineering, neurosciences and biochemistry to the field, and in animal and
plant sciences. Over the next five years we will be hiring 40 new faculty
members into the biosciences, building the base operating budget by at least $5
million and supporting new facilities and laboratories to the extent we are
able. It is our principal academic
thrust. Now,
let me anticipate a question that is frequently asked. Do Maryland’s research
universities have large enough research programs to keep pace with those of
other major research universities like Stanford, Berkeley, MIT and
Harvard? In that regard you might
be interested in the following statistics, reported by the Community of Science. In 1997, Berkeley and Stanford
together spent $750 million in research.
Harvard and MIT together spent $710 million. Duke, North Carolina and NC State spent $700 million. In
the same year, Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland, College Park,
together spent $1 billion. Dollars
alone do not guarantee quality, though absence of dollars probably does
guarantee absence of quality.
And there are legitimate questions about any such a comparison. But basically these figures do
tell us that Maryland's universities are competitive in the size of their
research enterprises. Couple
this with the especially close relationships our universities enjoy with major
federal facilities and laboratories, and we should represent a formidable
partner for the commercial sector in the development of new ideas and
technologies in this state. I
say this all to demonstrate that, as president of a national research
university, the state’s flagship research university, I am serious, and
my colleagues are serious, about the strong prospect of putting Maryland on the
map as a high-tech leader. I
know that you, as businessmen, are equally serious. We have plenty of evidence
of the state and federal commitment to economic development. So,
what is missing? Why doesn't our 150,000-foot view of Maryland project
nationally and internationally in the same way Silicon Valley, Route 128 and
the Research Triangle do? Why are
we not automatically seen as a high tech leader? In
writing about competition Professor Michael Porter of the Harvard Business
School lists six ingredients that are required to create an entrepreneurial
cluster. They are:
You
should decide how we should be graded on each ingredient. However my grading
would be: (1) excellent, very strong, (2) quite good but can improve, (3)
relatively weak earlier but is getting stronger, (4) excellent potential but
disconnected and greatly underutilized, (5) relatively few but a growing
number, (6) spotty strength but generally weak commitment. Now
is time for Maryland to project itself as an entrepreneurial cluster. From 150,000 feet the cluster looks
like a backbone extending
geographically down the I-270 corridor, connecting to College Park and then
extending to Baltimore along I-95. The ribs off this backbone are the many technology
companies, government labs and universities along the way. This research backbone is the
foundation of information technology, biotechnology and the micro- and
nanotechnology industries.
The concentration of the state’s technology enterprises along this
backbone, forming this cluster, is striking. I
offer all of us a call to action to bring our 150,000-foot view to life. We need to consider the following
actions:
I
believe, like Frederick Terman did, that universities must provide a vision for
success that penetrates both internally on our campuses, through faculty
appointments and student preparation, and externally through outreach efforts
that include participation in the development of technology businesses,
technology support to emerging companies and professional training in emerging
fields. Maryland
has the opportunity to create a new model of economic success. We can be the
next wave. Our connections to the
45 federal facilities in the state is our unfair advantage. If all of us concentrate on the vision
of Maryland’s growth and prosperity as a leader in information, biotechnology,
and nanotechnology and if we work toward building the partnerships that are
mandated for success in this new economy, our combined strengths will create a
new paradigm for economic development in the 21st century—one
that even Silicon Valley might someday envy. |
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