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New York research institute offering help to Northern California companies

A delegation of 60 trustees and leaders from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York recently invaded Northern California. Why would a well-known tech school from the East Coast converge on the West Coast?

Well, RIT, with its unique mix of right-brain and left-brain programs, is looking to become a new kind of university in which innovation and creativity are at the core of everything we do.

For that reason, we came to form strategic relations with cutting-edge companies on the West Coast that are noted for their innovative approaches to the production of new products and services.

The RIT delegation met with 22 companies over three days in July with discussions centered on innovation, corporate research and development, sustainability – or “clean tech” as they say in California – and collaborative models.

We see our visit as a call to national service. America’s traditional technological leadership is in jeopardy. Competitive cost cutting has forced the elimination of all but the shortest-term research and development programs in the private sector, and our major corporate laboratories have all but vanished.

Yet our institutions of higher education in the U.S. are still without question the finest in the world, and they possess a reservoir of intellectual talent and creativity unmatched anywhere else. American graduate students are still the most cost-effective research and development labor force anywhere. In addition, many colleges and universities have laboratory assets that would be prohibitively expensive for most companies to reproduce.

Imagine, therefore, a group of colleges and universities that decide to make graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, staff and facilities available to companies to carry out corporate research and development projects at low cost and without the intellectual property fights that usually derail such efforts. Imagine a new relationship between business and academia in which hundreds of companies discover that they can once again afford to do new product research and development, while identifying future employees at the same time.

At RIT, we have established a program to accept a modest up-front payment – to be shared by the students, faculty and the institution – in return for relinquishing all IP rights associated with the work to the sponsoring company. We already have several East Coast companies on board, and we received a good response from the companies we recently met with in Northern California.

Why consider partnering with RIT?

• RIT is the third-largest provider of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) degrees in the nation among all private colleges and universities.

• RIT is leading the country in the number of overall computing degrees awarded each year.

• With 16,000 students, RIT has one of the largest cooperative education programs in the nation.

The U.S. faces real challenges in many areas, but there are also extraordinary opportunities for economic growth in this country if we have the courage to exploit them. Our future economic prosperity may well depend on our success in exploiting one of our last competitive advantages – America’s institutions of higher education and the extraordinary research and development assets that they represent. Let’s get on with it.

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Bill Destler is president of Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester N.Y. To learn more about RIT’s corporate research and development program, visit www.rit.edu/research/corporate/.