Universities: One Engine for Driving the Economy of Central Massachusetts

My friend Mark Love at the Chamber of Commerce always tells me that businesses ask five key questions when considering a move to a new city or region. One is about the cost of doing business including the tax structure. Another is about site availability. A third is about available transportation and the fourth about quality of life. Worcester has an unfavorable commercial tax rate and most available sites are brownfields, which, however, can be cleaned up; but other communities in this region who score better on those two questions lack the extensive infrastructure the city can provide. On the third and fourth questions the region scores very well outside of the airport problem, which absolutely must be addressed over the next few years in order for Worcester to maximize its potential.

The fifth question has to do with an educated workforce. Here the region scores quite well indeed. We have good schools, and few cities the size of Worcester can claim the number and quality of college graduates Worcester produces each year. Most of the excellent graduates at least of Holy Cross, Clark, and WPI, however, leave central Massachusetts because they do not find career opportunities here. That need not always be the case.

There is enormous potential, moreover, for universities to play a pivotal role in driving the economic engine of central Massachusetts, as they do for Boston and I495-and, I must add, Research Triangle Park, Silicon Valley, the biotech growth in San Diego, and elsewhere. They can do it through partnerships that grow out of the universities' research strengths and professional expertise as well as through the need of business for workforce development.

From 1993 to 2000 I was a dean at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, which because of the proximity of the University, with its excellence in medicine and engineering, University Hospitals, and the Cleveland Clinic (now that their various civil wars have subsided) has the potential to be one of the most remarkable centers of medically related research in the world. But for years the University and the region have achieved synergies through connections between Case engineering and local manufacturing, between the Weatherhead School and local business, and through other roles played by the Law School, the Mandel Nonprofit Center, the health-science schools, and the College of Arts and Sciences.

From 1984 to 1993 I was at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, in the Triangle Area, which includes Duke and Chapel Hill as well as the industries and research of Research Triangle Park. NC State when I was leaving had started a new Centennial Campus adjacent to the main campus. When I left it had two buildings-a textiles center and an engineering facility. When I visited last October it had 25 buildings-including incubator and entrepreneurial centers as well as University research buildings. All this came from partnerships, and central Massachusetts has the same kind of potential.

Only since World War II have universities really driven economic development. It began with the federal decision to center national research in a set of research universities plus, of course, a handful of national labs such as Brook Haven and Woods Hole. Federal funding plus corporate research funding moved us over several decades from a time when most industrial research was done in house ("Better living through Chemistry") to a time when a major part of industrial development depends directly or indirectly on research in universities, and when there is much movement between universities and industry, as eastern Massachusetts has seen not only with Harvard and MIT but also with places like Tufts, Boston U., and the engineering program at Lowell.

Creating the same kind of culture is possible in central Massachusetts, even if on a smaller scale. We have The University of Massachusetts Medical School, WPI, Clark, Holy Cross, and other schools including a fine veterinary school and a fine pharmacy school. It is not clear to me, however, that anyone in this region really has an adequate census of all the highly regarded research strengths and the professional expertise available to help grow central Massachusetts economically-and to improve the quality of life, an equally important goal. Actually it is not clear to me that anyone at the state level has this kind of systematic knowledge either, although some officials may know parts of the map well. Someone at the regional-and indeed the state-level should have that data base. Every university, moreover, should have an official in the President's office who can open doors for collaborations for economic development and quality of life initiatives.

What is our potential future here? I am influenced by a model used by Michael Porter, who sees 70% of any region's economy coming from the services needed by the people who live there anyway and 30% being what all the regions fight over, the manufacturing and services that are the real value added for a region. How can central Massachusetts successfully compete for that 30%, or maybe 35%? Is there a future for manufacturing, for example in metal, plastics, and paper industries? Of course, but it will never be like it was in the 1940s and 1950s. Is there a future for product distribution here? Yes, because of our location and infrastructure. Is there a larger future for banking and finance? I doubt it, for most of the control is out of our hands. Is there a future for high-tech? Yes, after it bottoms out, in the I495 corridor with limited expansion westward.

You can fill in five or six other topics yourself, but certainly there is a big future potentially for biomedical and biotechnical industries, although we know they can be slow-growth and high-attrition initiatives and they cannot be our only focus. But we do have a great medical school with a new 10-story research building; a splendid engineering school, WPI, at the center of the region's major new bioengineering initiative; a third university, Clark, with doctoral programs in the bench sciences and internationally recognized research in related social sciences; a vet school and a pharmacy school with faculty members doing research in life sciences; other colleges including a splendid community college very much in tune with workforce development needs; and an existing biotech industry that includes Abbott and many smaller players, some with a good bit of promise. Remember that there are over 500 bio-related companies in the Commonwealth.

The universities of the Worcester region bring some very special assets to its economy. First, UMass Medical School, in no small part through the leadership of Aaron Lazare, has developed into the finest public medical school north of the Mason-Dixon line. In the time available I cannot review all of the many internationally recognized scientists now on board there. Some of you are well aware of such strengths as the diabetes research being done by Aldo Rossini and others. Craig Mello is one internationally respected leader of a team working on RNA interference or regulation, which identifies RNA that can silence genes and can thereby help researchers block the development of genes causing diseases. This area of research was designated a Breakthrough Area by Science Magazine last year, and it is a UMass strength. So is work in several areas of chemical biology that support important pharmaceutical developments. Most recently UMass has become a leader in a collaboration to isolate the SARS agent and develop human antibodies to the syndrome. All this has commercial implications. And there is so much more.

WPI for many years has been an excellent teaching engineering school. Under the leadership of Ed Parrish over the last decade or so, however, it has also become a major player in research in science and engineering. Most important today is the splendid new Bioengineering Institute dedicated last week by Senator Kennedy, Congressman McGovern, and others. The institute, under the direction of an internationally recognized scientist, Timothy Gerrity, should bring not millions but billions of dollars into this region. It is a collaboration among many players, the two central ones being UMass and WPI but also including biotech companies, MBI, WBDC, and potentially Clark and other universities.

The Institute will have at least four major emphases. One, health care, will lead to new medical instruments that, as only one example, can monitor a person's health functions at a distance. A second emphasis is tissue engineering, which can lead to enhanced life through the regeneration of tissues in parts of the body that have not naturally replaced dead tissue. A third, molecular engineering, draws on nanotechnologies tied to sophisticated manipulation of natural molecular structures for various device applications. A fourth is neuroimaging, and here the WPI-UMass collaboration effectively develops MRI or imaging technologies to improve our understanding of the physiology of mental illnesses.

But beyond the Institute WPI has also developed an excellent center for Fuel Cell research, the hottest area currently in planning energy options for the future. I have been connecting the scientists with those at Case Western Reserve, which has probably the best fuel-cell center in America right now. Secondly, WPI has a long and excellent tradition in metal processing and metallurgy, and in those areas there are longstanding industrial ties. Thirdly, WPI is now also emphasizing information analysis. In the near future it will be at the center of a region-wide multi-institutional initiative in bioinformatics. It has also taken the lead in research on security for wireless information systems.

Clark University, in addition to doctoral programs and excellent research in the three main bench sciences, some of it collaborative with the other universities, has widely recognized excellence in Geography, International Development, and Psychology. Research in Geography includes advanced work in Geographic Information Systems, which can analyze use and development of spaces and connect demographic, economic, and spatial information in ways useful for planning development and quality of life initiatives. Clark's excellence in urban economic geography as well as in international areas is also important to regional growth.

Holy Cross has no doctoral programs, but actually has some fine scientists. Holy Cross has real depth, however, in area studies, for example, in research on the economies, politics, and cultures of countries in Asia and Latin America. In fact the international expertise of Holy Cross, Clark, and WPI, is a resource for companies considering markets in Africa, Europe, Asia, and Latin America that is as strong as that in any region in the country.

Clark and WPI have fine business schools that have not been well utilized by this region for their professional expertise. And, of course, you have some experts at other colleges such as Assumption and Worcester State and the Mass College of Pharmacy and certainly at Tufts Vet School.

In closing let me say that my own model of economic development is a broader one. I see Worcester, I495, and Boston as a continuum with Worcester as the western anchor and Boston as the eastern anchor. The three may at times compete; but the Commonwealth needs to have a strategy for growing the entire region utilizing all assets and resources existing along the way. In a larger sense, of course, we really have a Boston, Providence, Worcester triangle that involves two states cooperating to develop new businesses and jobs and to bring businesses here rather than, perhaps, North Carolina or Texas. The I95, I495, and Blackstone Valley corridors will make this all one area. The Pioneer Valley from Springfield to Hartford, of course, is also important to the Commonwealth, and researchers at UMass-Amherst will likely end up playing significant roles in central as well as western Massachusetts.

As we work together to develop our region, I can confidently say that all of the universities in Worcester look forward to working with businesses, towns, the Commonwealth, venture capitalists, and local schools to grow the economy and maintain a high quality of life, to help create the support structures-including education and housing-and the "sizzle" to make central Massachusetts part of the "buzz" for people looking to grow and expand businesses. We all want a future in which we build our tax base and create new jobs, and we all want a future in which the best and the brightest of our college graduates find the jobs and careers available here to keep them from leaving central Massachusetts.