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basis
in a “new direction” which will narrow the
organization’s focus. This “focused plan” will
concentrate on federal research dollars,
commercialization of technically sound ideas, and,
lastly, technology-based economic development.
Focus
is an interesting juxtaposition of rhetoric and
reality because CIT has been all over the map in
years past, leaving many confused about what the
Center is supposed to do and how to best measure its
success. This “new” plan doesn’t promise to be
any better from this observer's point of view.
The
reason that CIT has had a checkered past and has an
uncertain future is that the fundamental idea behind
it is flawed.
Growing
the technology base in universities and local
industries is a hot topic for states these days and
has been for at least the last two decades.
Some do it better than others. Our publisher,
Mr. Bacon, has already critiqued Virginia’s economic
development strategy as being somewhat behind
the times, and we won’t disagree with him.
Much
of the enthusiasm
for technology-based growth comes from the enduring
success of the Palo Alto/Silicon Valley area with
its strong ties to the Stanford research base, which
has spun off everything from IT powers to biotech
companies. The dot.com meltdown has taken a little
of the luster from that particular apple but there
is still a lot of money that wasn’t there 20 years
ago.
In
general, those involved in CIT’s management and
oversight seem to have never mastered the concept of
critical mass. Indeed, CIT was criticized in the
Gilmore Administration for having a “Johnny
Appleseed” strategy of throwing a few dollars here
and a few dollars there in small grants but never
putting enough funding into any one thing to really
make a difference.
The idea, in caricature form, seems to be to
make lots of friends by giving them each a little
bite at the apple and then holding dinners and award
ceremonies wherein one can say nice things about the
recipients as they go down the tubes.
It does have the (unintended?) benefit of
ensuring that the CIT personnel involved in the dole
always get their calls returned and can draw a crowd
at technology council dinners.
Where
to invest technology funding is not a no-brainer.
Since one of us had the great good fortune to work
for the Chief Technical Officer of a Fortune 100
company with a significant (approximately one
billion dollars) research budget, we have some
insight into how difficult the process is. Also,
having watched federal legislators, especially those
on the Republican side of the aisle, struggle
publicly with “picking winners and losers” it is
also easy to see how the investment of public funds
can rapidly become a political football.
There
does seem to be an answer, and it is extrapolated
from the experience of the technology communities
that have grown up around universities such as
Stanford, MIT, and, to a lesser extent, are growing
up around Virginia Tech, UVA and VCU. Ironically,
further evidence can be found in a recent CIT
publication in which the lead article touts the
success of the Fiber & Electro-Optics Research
Center at Tech which has spun off 18 companies with
over 200 jobs and attracted more than $30 million in
research. That is the type of social return that
taxpayers and legislators are looking for.
So,
where are we going with this? Invest
the money in advancing one or two of Virginia’s research universities into the national front
rank. Building a strong research base in Virginia’s universities will do more to advance technology
in the Commonwealth than keeping CIT alive will ever
do. It also will have a number of ancillary benefits
in student achievement and economic development.
That
is a clear goal and it is measurable by the criteria
that the American Association for the Advancement of
Science and others use to evaluate the standing of
research universities. It is also an external
measure not subject to manipulation by those with an
ax to grind. If
one were to tie the evaluation process to successful
commercialization of the technology so developed,
one would have met two of the three goals announced
by the CIT Board.
The
third goal identified by the Board as part of its
“new” direction, increasing the non-defense
federal research dollars coming to Virginia, is already well under way.
One
of Ms. Armstrong’s many good moves was to bring on
board an experienced and effective federal R&D
manager to increase this source of funding – after
she let go some staffers who were not well suited to
her idea of where CIT could add value. Increased
federal research funding is essential for several
reasons, none of which are original to Secretary
George Newstrom or the current CIT Board.
The Federal science and technology (S&T)
agencies are usually right on top of key S&T
trends and opportunities and are always looking for
outstanding research departments to further program
goals and provide them with the kind of results that
they can use to justify another year’s funding
from the Congress.
In
addition, federal grants usually go directly to the
principal investigators at the universities or
companies conducting the research and thereby avoid
altogether the no value-added middleman function
that CIT has always found so difficult to justify to
the General Assembly. We recognize, of course, that
university researchers have to be careful about the
indirect costs they tack onto federal grants, but
that is another subject.
So,
Virginia
has a new direction that isn’t new and is
replacing a competent and dedicated, if somewhat
cautious, leader with who knows whom to attempt to
implement a failed strategy with the same old crowd.
What, then, might be behind all
of these shenanigans?
We
have a lot of friends on the CIT Board and know them
to be bright, successful, energetic, and technically
sound but not necessarily students of technology
policy. Our good friend Sudhaker Shenoy, CEO of IMC,
must have been eating lunch at his desk and caught
with a mouthful of sandwich when he made his
timeless pronouncement on metrics for the Potomac
Tech Journal. “We’re going to eat the same kind of
food, but now we’re going to measure what we’re
eating.” You want fries with that, Shenoy?
In
any event, we haven’t talked to any of the CIT
Board members in quite a while so what follows is
speculative. Suppose you were sitting around reading
the tea leaves and saw that the General Assembly’s
Joint Commission on Technology and Science (JCOTS)
was scheduled to hold hearings on CIT and that
former Governor L. Douglas Wilder, no friend of CIT, had been
given a hunting license to reduce governmental
expenditures -- complete with his own eponymous
Commission. You might conclude that CIT was about to
come under attack and that, as board members with a
fiduciary responsibility for the institution, you
should do something to save it. If that were the
case, all this new-direction, new-leadership stuff
might become a bit more understandable. Is this a
strategy for keeping CIT alive?
The
larger issue is should
we? We
would argue probably not. A small, focused
extension of the Secretary of Technology’s office
near D.C. to work on the federal research funding
issue and a small research office to support the
Secretary in keeping up with the latest in
technology trends would be useful. But the rest of
the work done by CIT could readily be assumed by
other state entities, including the Small
Business
Development
Centers, the community colleges and others. The CIT
building, despite being ugly, is in a prime location
and the land on which it sits could be sold for a
handsome price. Is this good place for a research
park, perhaps?
Well,
you might reasonably ask, if it’s all so clear,
why hasn’t it been done? It was definitely discussed inside the
Gilmore Administration. The need to help advance one
or more of Virginia’s universities into the top 25 nationally was a
major motivation behind the eventual establishment
of the Virginia Research and Technology Advisory
Commission. But it
was thought that establishing the new
Secretariat of Technology and disestablishing CIT in
the same breath would confuse matters. But times
have changed drastically in the last 18 months and
everything is – or should be – on the table.
-- August 12, 2002
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