Rhode Island has embarked on an economic investment strategy that might put the squeeze on state coffers in the short term but should ultimately position the state to grow its economy in an increasingly competitive, global environment.
That assessment was recently offered by C. Michael Cassidy, president of the Georgia Research Alliance, a nonprofit organization that has blazed a trail for states investing in scientific research as a means of economic development.
“It was a decade for us. I don’t think it should be that long for you,” Cassidy said in an interview with Providence Business News.
Since its creation in 1990, the Georgia Research Alliance has spent $400 million on efforts to increase the quality and scale of scientific and technological research at six Georgia universities, and to help entrepreneurs spin the research off into new companies.
The effort is credited with helping to draw $2 billion in federal and private investment into Georgia and supporting the formation of 125 companies that employ more than 4,000 people in high-paying technology jobs.
Cassidy visited Providence on Oct. 4 as a guest speaker at a meeting of the R.I. Science and Technology Advisory Council, which Gov. Donald L. Carcieri created two years ago with the goal of building the state’s biomedical and information technology sectors.
Not surprisingly, Cassidy praised STAC’s Research Alliance grants, which fund collaborative research projects involving disparate players in both academia and the private sector. The program, which was launched last year and has a $1.5 million annual budget, is currently reviewing applications for a second round of funding.
“It’s a great strategy, I think, over the next couple of years,” he said. “This collaboration grants program is absolutely the right strategy. That’s where everything needs to start. You’ve got all these individual institutions, and you’ve got to get them wired together.”
Offering grants for research that brings together scientists from separate universities is especially useful because it breaks down the resistance to collaboration often found at the administrative level of competing local schools, Cassidy said.
“We learned that it’s difficult to push that down from the top,” he said. “It’s so much smarter to get faculty interested and excited about new research opportunities, and as they start to work together they’re going to be telling their deans, their department heads, their presidents, ‘This makes a lot of sense.’ ”
The Rhode Island Research Alliance grant program essentially paid for itself last year, he said, when one of the funded research teams – which is working to find a treatment for testicular cancer and is led by Eric Hall, a professor at Rhode Island College – recently received $1.46 million from the National Institutes of Health.
Along the same lines, Cassidy said the proposed merger of Lifespan and Care New England would remove institutional barriers to important collaborative research and bring increased funding into Rhode Island.
Cassidy acknowledged the difficulty that economic development officials face in calling for increased public funding for private research projects at a time of ballooning budget deficits and steep cuts to public programs. But he said the investments would pay off in the long run.
Georgia was facing its worst budget deficit in half a century, with spending cuts across all state agencies, when the state spent $15 million to launch the Georgia Research Alliance in 1990, Cassidy recalled.
“It is complicated [for the] governor and members of the legislature to sometimes rationalize putting state dollars into a private university, but I would,” he said.
And Cassidy praised Carcieri’s use of the word “investment” to describe his administration’s economic development strategy.
“I was delighted to hear the governor out of the box say, ‘This is an investment,’ ” he said. “If you have the governmental leadership understanding that it’s an investment, and not just an annual appropriation and expenditure, you’re already 50 yards down the field.”
Offering advice, Cassidy said economic development officials need to spend enough money on their internal operations to maintain a well-oiled marketing and communications machine, and to adopt the use of metrics capable of measuring economic growth spurred by scientific research.
“It took us about 10 years to get the kinds of results that could be measured with economic development metrics – you know, new company formation, job creation – we were able after a decade to really talk about some numbers being generated,” he said. “But from day one … you make a small grant, you put people together, they draw funding in from the larger federal funding agencies, and that’s a success because those are dollars that spend out in the economy just like all other economic activity does.” •
