Turning brainpower into companies
August 3, 2010
North Carolina’s Research Triangle last year scored as the brainiest U.S. region, ahead of San Francisco’s Bay Area, which is home to Silicon Valley. Universities in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill and Research Triangle Park, a research and development hub of world renown and state economic engine, had a lot to do with the winning score.
But brainiest doesn’t mean most entrepreneurial as Ted Zoller, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and director of UNC’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, found out.
Depending on the counting method, the RTP area generated 1,500 startup companies since 1970 or 358 startups since 1984. Any way you look at the numbers, they represent a fraction of the more than 5,500 information technology and life science companies that have sprung up in Silicon Valley in the past 25 years.
So, how could the RTP area more effectively turn the local brainpower into companies that develop better medicines, faster computer chips and cleaner energy? What is needed to better capture the ideas and turn them into more businesses and jobs?
Incubators have long been the tool to do just that: help innovation hatch and grow.
RTP itself is kind of an incubator as the Daily Beast, the online publication that coined the smartest city contest, pointed out. Established more than 50 years ago on a few thousand acres unsuitable for agriculture, RTP was meant to attract R&D facilities of large corporations looking to expand.
A more traditional definition of a business incubator is a place where small, fledgling companies can develop technologies invented at universities or in large corporate labs. Incubators that fit that definition have also been around for about half a century. But not in RTP, which focused on corporate R&D activities for a long time.
Read more at Science in the Triangle...