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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > April > 19
Monday, April 19, 2010
Guest column: Fund nurtures ideas that can be potent job engines
This column was written by David R. Hopkins, president of Wright State University.
When I think about the Ohio’s Third Frontier program, I think about Nick Schroeder.
A few short years ago, Nick was working in a fast-food restaurant. Today, the Wright State University graduate is using lasers to make precision cuts needed to manufacture medical instruments.
Schroeder landed the job with the Mound Laser & Photonics Center, thanks to funding from the Ohio Third Frontier — an ambitious effort to grow new companies and new technologies in the state.
Voters will be asked May 4 to approve selling $700 million in bonds that would continue to fund the Third Frontier. That investment has helped create an infrastructure of buildings, equipment and people that is becoming the backbone of the new knowledge-based economy.
In a few short years, Wright State University alone has turned $24 million in Third Frontier funding into hundreds of new jobs. In addition, Third Frontier funding has provided a platform for schools like Wright State and the University of Dayton to work together.
A Third Frontier grant of $28 million helped establish the Institute for the Development and Commercialization of Advanced Sensor Technology, or IDCAST. Led by the University of Dayton Research Institute, this world-class center also includes Wright State, the Air Force and dozens of private companies.
We’re all working together to commercialize sensors, devices that receive and convert signals for such things as detecting chemical or biological agents.
In three years, more than 250 jobs related to the work at IDCAST have been created. And Photon-X, a company that is developing a lightweight, affordable 3-D camera, expects its new product to create thousands of jobs in coming years.
Third Frontier activities have created a powerful union of talent, pooling the strengths of the Wright State Research Institute, the Wright Brothers Institute, the Dayton Development Coalition and the 711th Human Performance Wing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
One of the most visible creations of Third Frontier funding is daytaOhio. That center features the dazzling, virtual-reality Appenzeller lab that takes visitors on journeys underneath the Earth’s surface, past factory assembly lines and retail stores, and even through the human bloodstream.
About $12.6 million in Third Frontier funding received by Wright State was used to start daytaOhio. The money helped create visualization and other facilities at four other universities that are networked together and to launch programs with the Air Force Research Lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base that use virtual reality to improve human performance.
To date, the Third Frontier funding managed by daytaOhio has also generated more than 230 new jobs, was matched by more than $40 million in research dollars from state universities and private companies, and has generated more than $16 million in new investments in Ohio.
It has also enabled daytaOhio to work with nine start-up businesses, the beginning of a “farm-system” that can take new technologies and turn them into commercial products.
Third Frontier money also helped create the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar position, which helped bring Amit Sheth, Ph.D., to Wright State. Sheth has founded two companies since his arrival, and his research has led to several commercial products.
Third Frontier funding has attracted Elliott Brown, Ph.D., a pioneering physicist and engineer from the University of California who is Wright State’s new endowed chair in experimental sensor physics.
Brown plans to build a center of excellence in sensors that will have applications in national security and counterterrorism as well as law enforcement and medicine. In still another area, about $1.5 million in Third Frontier money helped build and equip the Center for Genomics Research.
With the goal of better diagnosing and treating cancer, the center uses technologies that enable researchers to more clearly understand differences between human cancers or assess responses to various toxic compounds.
These powerful cross-disciplinary alliances of researchers, scientists and engineers are into everything from neuroscience to micro air vehicles.
The Third Frontier has given birth to a wonderful set of assets. If nourished, these assets promise to become powerful job-producing engines.
If we have the courage to continue the Third Frontier, the Nick Schroeders of the world and all Ohioans will have a brighter future.
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2010 Election
If you can’t explain the Third Frontier to people at work, that’s OK; it’s complicated. But that’s not a reason to vote against it.
Passing Issue 1 on May 4 would allow the state to borrow $700 million for the purpose of creating new jobs, mainly by leveraging research at Ohio’s universities.
The Dayton region, incidentally, has been a primary beneficiary of the existing Third Frontier effort, which began under former Gov. Bob Taft. More than $120 million has been awarded to local universities and ventures.
How does it work?
The state has set up a competitive process — using the prestigious National Academy of Sciences — for evaluating university research projects that typically have a business partnership. The aim is to commercialize inventions, products and processes — to get them from the lab to the market.
Making and selling things then creates jobs.
Research and development are hugely expensive in today’s economy. There are always more good ideas than there is money to pay for the tedious trial-and-error effort it takes to make the next big thing.
Yes. Orville and Wilbur Wright invented a plane in a bicycle shop; but even they would have trouble discovering, say, new kinds of environmentally-friendly jet fuel or composite material that won’t burn up in space without some pretty big money behind them.
Tinkers and lone inventors still are coming up with great ideas. But that’s not the typical way that discoveries are made. It is a more complicated world.
If the best researchers and most promising start-up companies can tap government money to get their projects going, that matters to them. It determines where their research teams will set up shop and where they’ll locate their companies. In this sense, the Third Frontier money is a recruiting tool, both of businesses and scholars.
How can taxpayers be assured that this isn’t a boondoogle?
Trust is involved, but the National Academy of Sciences experts rank the grant applications; their recommendations are public. There’s also a commission that must vote on the awards in public. These protections exist to ensure that only the best ideas are funded.
If the bond issue does pass, Ohio will have committed more than $2 billion over 10 years to a strategic, targeted effort to play to the strengths of its universities and to businesses that are committed to growing here.
Though currently there’s money for the program through June 2011, renewing the Third Frontier now tells renown researchers and venture capitalists that Ohio’s effort to help them succeed isn’t a fad.
Opponents of Issue 1 have no case except that government shouldn’t be in the business of trying to create jobs.
If venture capital grew on trees, if the best minds in academia and business were limited in where they could do their thing, if Ohio weren’t struggling so hard to transition from its blue-collar past, maybe we could afford to take that sort of hands-off approach. But that’s not Ohio’s reality.
Issue 1 is central to moving the state ahead. Vote for Issue 1.
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