Research at the University of Michigan
Article written for 
www.annarborbusinessmagazine.com
The University of Michigan is an economic powerhouse in the Ann Arbor area community, positively impacting hundreds of thousands of lives every year. With more than 30,000 employees and nineteen academic schools and colleges across three campuses (Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint), U-M engages over 40,000 students and hands out around 11,500 degrees each year.
A major driving force of the University’s impact and success is its vast array of research activity. Each year, U-M spends over $1 billion in research ($1.2 billion in fiscal 2010). In fact, U-M has the largest research portfolio in the country among all public universities.
Dr. Stephen R. Forrest is Vice President for Research at the University of Michigan and the William Gould Dow Collegiate Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Dr. Forrest’s role in the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) is to nurture and support excellence in research across the University by working with the deans and department chairs in supporting interdisciplinary research.
We had the chance to speak with Dr. Forrest on how research is coordinated at U-M and what the growing trend in public/private collaboration can mean for the location Ann Arbor area economy.
With such depth a breadth of research conducted at U-M, how do you orchestrate the research efforts? What are your unifying principles?
It’s really a ground-up approach in the sense that it starts with a lot of people and a lot of ideas. The ideas then move upwards perhaps in a pyramidal format. As people develop their own ideas and their own themes, they find that there are pieces that are missing.
If we were to try to orchestrate the effort, things would start to unravel fairly quickly. My office’s job is to recognize where these pieces might be bubbling up independently, and then make them aware of each other and even to provide resources to get them to start to work together. They then join with others to form small teams, and these small teams then form bigger teams. All of sudden you have some things going on that really do stand out across the campus and across the world.
This is, I think, a pretty common paradigm for university research. You need a place that has scale; a lot different of people looking at a problem from different angles. And this is one of our true strengths here a U-M. If there’s one thing that the University of Michigan has is scale. So, we’re really well-positioned to take on much larger problems than the average institution.”
The scale of problems facing humankind is vast: climate challenges, energy challenges, and the spread of disease, to mention a few. We have such a plethora of interactions between human beings and the environment that affect our health and standard of living. These are grand challenges facing humankind today, and there are very few places that can address them.
The University of Michigan is far too small by itself to address these problems, of course, but at least we can generate that nucleus that can drive a theme within those problems. We can then link with other universities, institutions, companies, NGOs, governments, etc. to really solve the big problems that we face.
Talk about the commercialization process and your relationships with the private sector.
Something that we’re very actively engaged in developing is our university partnerships with the private sector. We’re doing that by starting a lot of private companies. The faculty has an idea and they test it in the lab, usually with government funding. If the idea has some legs to it they pursue opportunities to commercialize the idea.
The old method of commercialization was basically to offer licenses in a rather vague and broad-brushed way to the world, asking companies “Would you like to commercialize this for us?” That’s a pretty passive way a doing business. The University of Michigan, as well as many other universities, began to take a more active approach of encouraging faculty to start their own companies if they were so motivated.
We feel that this is very much part of our mission as a public university. The public good in this state is for economic development, there’s no question about that.
We’re a pretty big job creator here at the University of Michigan, certainly the largest in the region. But we also can do more. So, we’ve been actively exploring mechanisms to incentivize faculty and companies to work together to leverage more of our federal investment, particularly to get it into the private sector.
This has been quite successful. We’ve been spinning off new companies at the rate of one every six weeks, and Ken Nesbit [Executive Director of the U-M Tech Transfer] says it’s getting closer to one every five weeks now.
One of the things that we did with the NCRC [North Campus Research Complex] that was new for the University of Michigan was that we started the U-M Venture Accelerator [located in the NCRC]. That seems to have fired up the engine even a bit more because faculty now don’t have to go searching for high-class facilities to start up their companies. They can get mentoring from people who help them with business plans and getting money. It’s a full service operation. Plus, there is an abundance of first rate laboratory space.
The U-M Venture Accelerator has accelerated the formation of new companies. But more importantly, it will put the new companies on a much more successful track early on so that we have fewer failures. The business of starting new companies is never an easy one.
Talk about Universities relationship with the general public.
The biggest investor in our research is the federal government. [U-M received over $750 million in federal research funds in fiscal 2010]. The government is investing even more broadly across the country. That is taxpayer money; we should never forget that.
We have a responsibility to the taxpayers to inform them of what the value that investment is achieving. Whether it is looking deep into the universe to see the distribution of mass of stars, or it is something very practical such as searching for cures to rare diseases, we have the responsibility as researchers to not only do the very best job we can with the money, but also to give the public feedback. If we don’t give that feedback, the public will have no reason to continue to make this investment.
I think one of the really fine pieces of American culture is that, by and large, although people may not always have an appreciation of how research is conducted, they believe that research has created the engine of innovation and economic value to this country. We don’t want to see this sentiment disappear.
When times get tough, as they certainly are now, we have an even greater responsibility to keep the public informed and make it part of the process so that we don’t get the myths forming around research that we sometimes see. There is the myth, for example, that there is a grand conspiracy by climate scientists to fudge the data so that everyone believes that global warming is a human-made effect simply so that scientists can get more research money. I think that these myths evolve and get legs is because we in the research community haven’t been sufficiently communicative.
One area where we need to pay more attention is to public policy. I work in the energy field, where it is very easy to see why you can’t stop at the lab bench. Let’s say you come up with a new technology for a more efficient way to generate wind energy. The question is how to get policy makers and the public to accept this innovation as a solution; that fossil fuel has limitations, and why we may need to think about its replacement or augmentation at the very least. This is, at heart, a policy issue.
If, as a researcher, all I do is create a new and better way to make energy from wind, what’s the use of it if it ends up just sitting in my lab? Therefore, I encourage my students, as do other faculty, to be more engaged with the public. The spectrum of engagement goes from taking the time to inform the public about what you’re doing, to making the effort to interact with and inform policy makers.
What are your priorities for the next 12-24 months?
First and foremost: we have to keep our own research enterprise quite strong in the face of very uncertain times in Washington. There is a lot of tension along with contradictory messages that we’re getting out of Washington about the importance of research and discovery to our future. We have to stay strong in our research efforts if America is to remain a global leader in innovation.
My priorities, next, are to ensure that our faculty who want to engage the external community can do so easily and effectively. To do this, we want to remove as many barriers as possible, and there are many barriers that are built within a university that can make this type of engagement more onerous than necessary. These barriers are there as protections for our faculty as well as the institution. There are conflicts of interests, as you can image, that arise, so we have to be cognizant and respectful of those barriers. But, we also need to make it easier for our faculty to get out there and work with the public as much as possible. All we have to do is make sure that we energize those faculty who want to do this. If these willing faculty are energized, we would have a wonderful organizational problem trying to serve all their needs.
What message do you have for the local Ann Arbor area business community?
If they have challenges, we have expertise to help. They need to come to us. They need to recognize us as a huge resource, a unique resource, probably in all the Midwest. Most of the local companies are now aware that we have a Business Engagement Center that works hard to connect companies that have a problem to solve, with problem solvers at U-M. And that has been a real benefit to both the university and industry.
Companies should not feel constrained by the BEC, however. If employees of a company have a challenge that needs addressing, and they know of a professor who can help them, they should contact that professor directly. But companies should reach out to us; we’re constantly reaching out to them. They should know that this is an extremely important value to U-M to be good partners with the local business community.
by David Baker and Margaret Baker
www.bakerstrategy.com
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