State University of New York Research and Innovation Symposium March 3, 2010 Center for Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT) Building Sam Stanley: Good morning and welcome, everybody. I'm Sam Stanley and it's my pleasure to welcome all of you to the Research and Innovation Symposium. Am I audible in the back? Carol, can you hear me okay? Great. So let me begin by a special welcome to our chancellor, Nancy Zimpher, whose drive and insight was really responsible for the launch of the SUNY Strategic Plan last year. This is a vitally important undertaking that we're hoping to augment today by really taking a look at the critical role that research and innovation are going to play in positioning SUNY in New York's economic future. And her personal commitment to the discussion and consultation process I think is evident by her presence today. And, Nancy, thank you for your leadership on this. I also send my welcome to all of you, the other attendees today. You're notable figures from research, industry, and academia and I thank you for taking the time to come here today to really start to try and define the modalities in research and innovation that are going to be important in really pushing SUNY forward. So thank you again for your willingness to be here. I think the ingenuity and creative power in this room really cannot be overestimated. I have personal knowledge of all of your qualifications and I'm very impressed by the caliber of the participants today. So I'm expecting great things from you. I'm expecting great things from the panel discussions, and I'm expecting great things from the working groups. So I'm throwing down the gauntlet. I really expect this to be a very productive symposium today. SUNY has really enormous resources that we bring to bear. We have tremendous intellectual resources and infrastructure that we can bring to bear to promote research and cooperation with industry that I think will help bolster the economy of New York and the whole country. We have R&D expenditures of over $1 billion annually. There's 10,000 research projects under SUNY leadership. And there's 29 jobs created for every $1 million in research support that we spend. So we have a significant impact on economic growth already. But I think we could do more. We've developed some very groundbreaking approaches to new partnerships. We're very proud to have the opportunity to host today's symposium in our Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology, or CEWIT. This is a $250 million government / industry / academic partnership and we hope is a model really for these kinds of partnerships on how to bring together multidisciplinary researchers from all the different realms of research together in ways to approach very important problems for our country. Stony Brook is involved in a number of other significant private-public partnerships. For example, with Brookhaven National Laboratory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory whose directors, Sam Aronson, and Bruce Stillman are here today. Bruce is sitting in the front row; he'll be involved in one of the panels. Sam, unfortunately, was here but let me know that he has a personal emergency so he won't be here for the discussion. But he sends his regards to everybody and his regrets that he won't be able to be here for this symposium. But both Brookhaven National Laboratory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory are really world-renowned research centers that are at the forefront, cutting edge in their fields and they've been home to a number of very impressive faculty including a number of Nobel Laureates. And I think we need to find additional ways for SUNY schools to collaborate with these institutions as well as with many other research groups represented in this room today, from industry and academia. I think all of us share a commitment to educating, training, increasing the pool of research scientists, and all of us share a commitment to fostering and increasing research growth. And there's a tremendous benefit to be gained from collaborations, through sharing of expertise, knowledge, and facilities. So I think we're here today because research and innovation are really catalysts for spurring on economic growth, vitality, and enhanced living standards for the communities in which we live. From the Latin word inovare, meaning to renew, innovation is inextricably tied to economic growth. The National Science Foundation has shown that increased investment on research and development parallels economic vigor and productivity. But despite this alignment, The National Science Foundation also reported in its most recent Science and Engineering Indicators Report from 2010 that there's been a steady decline in U.S. R&D investment, particularly as compared to Asian countries. So we're essentially losing our long-held lead in this most vital metric. So I think SUNY and other research leaders in the United States must do their part and try and serve as a major bulwark against this fallout. And we must play an important role in really returning the U.S. to its frontrunner status. So if we're going to be successful in SUNY's strategic plan I believe we must embrace the tenets of the partnership approach, and fundamentally recognize and act upon the concept that investment in research and innovation is absolutely key to New York's economic growth. We must find creative ways to enhance our productivity and grow the research enterprise. I think the challenges are clear. I think the opportunities are many. I await with much interest the outcome of today's discussion, and I thank you all for your willingness to help in this very vital effort. So it's now my pleasure to introduce the chairman of the State University of New York Board of Trustees, Mr. Carl Hayden. Carl? applause Carl Hayden: Thank you, Sam. Good morning, everyone. I don't believe that we've yet had such a distinguished aggregation of leaders in one place and I'm so grateful you came out on this mildly blustery morning. I want to thank especially my colleagues, Mike Russell and Cary Staller. Stony Brook, as you know, has had great champions in these men. And they have not limited themselves to advocating for Stony Brook University. At the end of the day, Michael was always a champion for the entire State University. And Cary is making an imprint immediately as well. And if there was ever any question about whether or not research would play a dominant role in this strategic planning process, Cary made it plain from the outset that he was going to be an individual advocate who would not be stilled on that subject. And we keep trying to say to him, "We care about it as much as you do!" but he remains to be convinced. I think today will be part of the process by which that occurs. It's a very interesting time. I mean, we're all reading the papers and observing various parts of our government implode, seemingly, day after day. The State University of New York, as you know, has been cut relentlessly over the last several years and there are a couple of things that I think suggest a cause to be hopeful even in these darkest of times. The first is the arrival of Nancy Zimpher. A great leader whose impact is being felt already and will be felt even more dramatically with the passage of time and with the formulation of the final product, Strategic Plan. The second is a growing recognition that the future belongs to those who can create, nurture, and commercialize intellectual capital. And the place where that happens is here. Here at Stony Brook and at other research institutions like Stony Brook. If we are to salvage anything in this traumatic time in our state's history, we will need to invest in the research impulse very much alive in places like Stony Brook. Newsday had a great editorial last week which I think just nailed it on the head. If you are not going to invest directly in the State University, you must at least free the State University to pursue the kinds of strategies that will allow it to make a difference in the lives of our citizens and in their economic prospects. That is what the Empowerment Act is all about and that is why we will work relentlessly to try to bring that to a successful conclusion. This is the moment that SUNY accepts the mantle of responsibility for leading this state in its research enterprise. We're going to do it with the resources that we have. If we're going to do it well we need investment, we need public-private partnerships. You represent, I believe, the capacity that will allow us to realize the research - the great, both latent and existing, research potential of this state. So I thank you very much for coming. Sam, thanks for hosting. It's going to be a great morning. applause Sam Stanley: It's now my pleasure to introduce SUNY Board of Trustees member and friend, Mr. Cary Staller. Cary Staller: Thank you very much. Please join me in thanking Chancellor Zimpher for convening this symposium on research and innovation. Under her leadership, SUNY is formulating a strategic plan which will help to revitalize both SUNY and the economy in New York. SUNY's fortunate to have a chancellor who understands that this strategic plan should provide a roadmap for how research and innovation can best be utilized to stimulate New York's economy. One of the best ways to grow our economy is to spin new technologies and businesses out of the SUNY research campuses. I also would like to thank President Stanley and all of you here who have come together to help the chancellor develop this plan. You know best the strengths of your respective institutions and where to leverage those strengths. You know best the most promising areas of research and innovation that SUNY should pursue. And you know best the promising young researchers we should attract to SUNY. This is a magnificent moment. Collectively, you have the opportunity to develop a strategic plan for research and innovation in science, medicine, and technology which will set the course for SUNY and New York State. You will then be able to participate in the implementation of this plan. I believe you will be very successful. And I believe your plan will be a model for other states to follow. There's a great divide in the U.S. today between those who understand research and those who don't. This presents a problem. For if the non-scientist doesn't have a clue about what the scientist is doing, society will not support research. So, I think part of your plan should explain how research and innovation leads to new discoveries and advance technologies which can create businesses and industries that will stay in New York in order to be close to the research universities from which they originated. I know this seems obvious to all of you here today, but trust me, it is not obvious to most people. Remember to think big and capture the public's imagination. When President Kennedy proposed a space program, he didn't think small and he didn't explain the science behind rocketry. He talked about going to the moon. Now that was something that everyone could understand. I'm not saying that all your proposals need to be so engaging. After all, the U.S. also invested heavily in ICBMs while working on moon rockets. But you get the point. You should captivate the public with part of the plan. Keep in mind that you should leverage SUNY's strengths but also take some risks. SUNY cannot excel in all areas. So concentrate on those areas where SUNY has expertise and infrastructure. That said, SUNY should also take risks on innovative research and new technologies. And I believe you can create a culture where the commercialization of new discoveries and the creation of new business ventures are seen as integral components of the best research universities. Accept that research universities need to evolve and embrace change and reasonable risk. In your deliberations and planning, focus on the greater good. Please put aside your department or your lab to focus on helping your respective universities, SUNY, and New York State. And keep in mind that part of your goal should be to develop a strategy to attract the best young researchers to SUNY. Since they will not have a voice in your deliberations, pay particular attention to this need. We have in place all of the tools for you to develop a comprehensive plan to invigorate the New York State economy through the research engine of SUNY. I believe this is a historic moment and I have confidence that each of you will work hard in a collaborative manner to develop a strategic plan. Thank you for your spirit and your effort. applause Sam Stanley: It's my great pleasure now to introduce the host for today's symposium, SUNY Chancellor, Nancy Zimpher. Nancy Zimpher: Thanks, Sam. Thanks, everybody. Actually Sam is the host. We've been fussing over who really is the host. It's Sam! But I have been given a few minutes on the docket to build context. So first let me acknowledge the context of my decision to come to SUNY, and that was the leadership of Carl Hayden and the partnership we have with the Board of Trustees. So, Carl, it's great to have you here. As many of you know, Carl has been a member of our conversations throughout the course of our strategic planning. Great to see you again, Mike Russell. Thank you for everything you've done for the Board of Trustees. And Cary. I said to Cary he's just written the preamble for this section of the strategic plan. So we're home-free. Thank you for your articulate remarks. And Sam, thank you for your leadership. Sam is not only our host in this wonderful facility representing Stony Brook and the numerous times that we've been on campus, which is wonderful, he is here with several of his peers. I wanted to acknowledge that a relatively new president of Nassau Community College, Donald Astrab, is here. Joyce Brown from FIT, president of FIT. George Gatta from Suffolk. And he brings with him a nominee, don't we say the presumptive president of Suffolk Community College who will appear before the Board of Trustees in March, Shaun McKay. David Heath is here from Optometry, Anne Kress from Monroe Community College, Andrew Matonak from Hudson Valley Community College. Which gives me an opportunity to repeat a conversation I had just before we convened, talking about the relationship, for instance, between U-Albany and the Nanoscale Science & Engineering College and Hudson Valley. So the big science of Nanoscale is being served by the laboratory, Clean Lab Technology Training Program of Hudson Valley. And that is why we have distinguished representation from the entire complement of the State University of New York. Because we believe that all sectors can unite around research and innovation. So presidents, thank you for your presence here today. Okay, we're in strategic planning mode and I do want to tell you that my view that this is a relatively radical notion of strategic planning persists. I think Cary's right. I think we are going to be known for this strategic plan because it invests so squarely in the revitalization of the State of New York and its enhanced quality of life. Not all universities can get beyond themselves long enough to talk about the external impact. And I'm glad you mentioned the moon because I think the big hairy audacious goal is the crafting of this strategic plan around really big - not too many, not too few - really big ideas that come to the caliber of a man on the moon by the end of the decade. So we've got that in mind, and I had it in mind when I trooped around the state this summer. Sixty-two campuses, 95 days. It was billed as a listening tour but, you know, it was much more proactive. We had faculty, staff, students, community leaders all putting issues on the table. And actually some concurrence around this notion, our central value proposition that the State University of New York can be, okay, if not the economic engine for the State of New York, a very powerful economic engine. That is the theme of our plan. Now we are back out in the state again testing a series of hypotheses. Like any good qualitative researcher, we recorded, we took massive notes of what people said during the 64-campus tour. It was a sea of issues that actually, even after about the seventh or eighth visit, sort of congealed around a set of themes and issues. There's a lot of fixing up we need to do of the way we do business. And so, on the one hand, very academic intellectual issues. On the other hand, how we can improve the way we deliver our services. We've reminded ourselves during the course of this strategic plan that we have a central mission of serving our capacities in research and innovation, of making the mobility of our students our highest priority, of really embracing innovative, instructional techniques, and always in service to our communities and to our state. Now, this is a little dizzying but it's very important. We have a way of engaging a lot of people in this planning process. And when you're looking at 64 campuses and a half a million students, and 87,000 employees, how do you bring it all together. You, first of all, invoke the authority and the leadership of the Board of Trustees. Carl is leading a task force of the trustees to oversee our strategic planning. You know that we recruited this Group of 200, the people who have sustained the conversation now around the state. We have formed working groups around our themes and issues and I am told that yesterday we had a fabulous working group meeting on energy that did manage... I can't tell you what they came up with but let me tell you, it's big, it's strategic, it's exciting. And the other working groups are doing the same. And in fact, we consider you our working group for research and innovation. And you are really the people who will take a broad, thematic strategic plan and make it sing and make it move into a set of strategic- and metric-driven actions. So, in a nutshell, here it is. New York at the center of our work. This economic revitalization. The themes of our work, the issues, the mission. And you see how research and innovation fits in so centrally. Along the way, however, this roadmap has become enabled by - and I love this - huge breakthrough called The Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act. It really gives legs to our capacity. And in this moment of great fiscal travail, this is a solution that doesn't carry an immediate, cash-it-out price tag. This is something this legislature and this Executive Branch can do for and with us without tapping into the financial exigencies that are presented to the state. And we've been able to make a claim to assert that this is a job-creating mechanism. We produce very talented prospective employees. Through our research and innovation, we produce jobs. And we do this through partnerships. So this bill, if you should happen to be stopped in the grocery store, "What is this Empowerment Act?" It's so simple. It is a three-legged stool of very informed, fair, equitable, and responsible tuition policy where we will manage our tuition. It will come from our students to our campuses to serve our students with adequate oversight by the legislature. It will secondarily create the land lease opportunities that will allow us to engage in much more transparent public-private partnerships to use our land for the research and innovation we are talking about today. And it unshackles us from a pre-audit process that protracts our purchasing power, our ability to acquire goods and services, in a timely and economically efficient environment. So the real key to our ability to be this economic engine is the combination of a big, ambitious, audacious strategic plan, and the most enlightened legislative initiative - I would say, Carl - in the 60-year history of the State University of New York. That, in a nutshell, is why you're here today. Thank you very much for coming. Sam? applause Sam Stanley: So the agenda today calls for two panel discussions and then working group discussions. So I'd like to ask this group, if they don't mind, to head to table two, yes? And then I'd like to call our first panelist up. So the first panel discussion is New Paradigms in Industry / Academic Relationships. Bob Catell will be the moderator. He's from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. David Hochman from Accelerated Technology Partners, Dr. Bernard Meyerson from the IBM Corporation, Yacov Shamash from Stony Brook University, and Jim Weyhenmeyer from the Research Foundation of New York. Gentlemen, if you would all come forward. And then Bob, I'm going to turn things over to you. Bob Catell: Give our panelists a chance to get seated and get comfortable. And good morning, everyone. I'm Bob Catell and as was mentioned, I'm on the Board of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, but I also have another job. I'm truly honored to be the chairman of the Advanced Energy Research Technology Center, which is under construction right next door to this building. So we look forward to a real opportunity for collaboration between those two institutes as well. I'd like to thank you President Stanley, Trustee Staller, Chairman Hayden, and Chancellor Zimpher for your opening remarks and really kind of setting the stage for the reason that we're here today. And I think one of the things that I took away from the remarks is that we obviously have to think innovatively and strategically but to think big. That there's an opportunity for SUNY to take a real leadership role in this area but we've got to come up with some big ideas and some new ideas. And really, I think that's a good lead-in for the panel that I've been asked to moderate this morning which is going to talk about New Paradigms in Industry / Academic Relationships. Again, I think all of you, and including Chairman Hayden, those whose members who spoke to us are relative newcomers here in New York. And I think that's a good thing. And I think it's really appropriate for you to be engaging all of us in thinking strategically about the role of a system that reaches into every corner of the state. Which the SUNY system does. And my panel colleagues commend you for doing that. I'm going to take just a very few minutes to introduce the members of the panel because we really want to hear from them. And their resumes and their very impressive bios are in the material that's been provided to you. So I will just have a brief introduction. I hope none of the panelists will be insulted that I won't say all of the wonderful things that they have accomplished. But I really want to give time to hear from them. In no particular order, I'll start with David Hochman. David is managing partner of Accelerated Technology Partners and president of Accelerated Technologies, Inc. Mr. Hochman has led financing transactions for over 20 early-stage companies, raising over $420 million in equity capital. Certainly knowledgeable in that area. Dr. Bernard Meyerson is Vice-President for Innovation with the IBM Corporation. He leads IBM's global university relations function within IBM's corporate headquarters organization, and is also responsible for the IBM Academy, a self- governed organization of approximately 1,000 executives and senior technical leaders from across IBM. Dr. Yacov Shamash. Who is probably not a stranger to anybody in this audience. Yacov is Vice-President for Economic Development. He's also Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences here at Stony Brook University. As vice-president, Dr. Shamash supervises the university's three incubators, two New York State Centers for Advanced Technology, the Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT) - that's the building you're in right here - the Advanced Research Technology Center which I mentioned, and the Small Business Development Center and the workforce development programs at the Center for Emerging Technologies. And he's also, as I mentioned, the Dean of the College of Engineering Applied Sciences and has over 1,700 undergraduates and 950 graduate students. Dr. James Weyhenmeyer is within the SUNY Research Foundation. He's an experienced senior administrator who has held several executive administrative appointments including Associate Vice-President for Academic Affairs, and Associate Vice-President for Economic Development and Corporate Relations. He's widely published in the areas of cardiovascular and stroke research, and is a professor in the area of biological sciences. Ed Reinfurt, the president of NYSTAR, was hoping to be with us this morning. Unfortunately, the - well, maybe not unfortunately - the governor called a special meeting of his cabinet around 11:15 this morning. So Ed apologizes for not being able to be here this morning. Okay. Let me just say a few words setting the stage and then we'll kind of turn it over to the panel. Research and innovation is one of the three fundamental elements of SUNY's mission, as well as the mission of any other major public university system. We're certainly living in a time of great change. We're in a new century with new global and regional relationships. We have a new chancellor at the State University and she, too, is a first - as in the first woman to be named chancellor of SUNY in its long and illustrious history - and a new president here at Stony Brook. The panel was asked to consider fundamental issues for SUNY's research enterprise, its relationship with industry. This relationship has undergone great change in the last generation and is still changing. So it would seem that we're maybe trying to hit a moving target. Let's hope we can score a bull's-eye. This is a crucial relationship because it has to do with universities as economic resources, contributing to the economy as was stated in the remarks by the chancellor, and helping to provide jobs as well as solving problems for society. It also has to do with universities finding resources to support research activity in a challenging federal environment. And that happens to be the subject of the second panel you'll hear from later this morning. The old paradigm for research university was the stereotype of the ivory tower. Researchers kept apart from society. They wanted to understand how things worked but they really weren't expected to think about practical solutions. The new paradigm for the research university hasn't firmed up as yet but it clearly isn't apart from society any longer. The economic leadership around Route 128, Boston, Silicon Valley in California, as successful technology regions put attention to MIT and Stanford whose faculty and students started many high- growth technology companies. An abundance of programs have been developed at the federal level, and also at the state level, to encourage interaction between universities and industry. Some of them actually originated right here at Stony Brook. The Centers for Advanced Technology Program, with an industry sector focus, is managed by Ed Reinfurt at NYSTAR. The Strategic Partnership for Industrial Resurgent Program, which Yacov Shamash helped create at SUNY, focuses on the needs of individual companies across the technology spectrum. The Centers of Excellence Program, which also has an industry sector focus, providing the building we're in right here today. So maybe we are looking for a new paradigm for industry / academic relationships. And maybe we don't have to reinvent the wheel. What I'd like to do to start the discussion is to pose a general question to the panel and let each of them take a crack at answering it. And we'll see where we go from there. So where I thought I would start, I think a theme that we heard from the opening remarks was SUNY taking a leadership role in this area. And if you look at SUNY, all over the campuses, you certainly have great research programs, you have some really great initiatives, some of which I'm involved in like the Smart Grid Initiative. And I guess the question I'd like to throw out to the panel is what can SUNY do to foster more collaboration with industry and are there any examples that you might cite where that has been successful. So I'll let any of the members take a crack at it. Don't fight. everyone laughs Bernard Meyerson: Let's not all jump on this at once. Bob Catell: You'll all get a chance. Bernard Meyerson: A good example, let's go back a bit in history. One of the secrets to winning these battles that we fight - and it's on a global level now - is you have to attack the discontinuities that are coming in technology, science, the very things you folks work on, and get out ahead of them. And it can have a profound impact. We talk about Silicon Valley and in fact there's no silicon left there. It actually all moved to Albany. Which is kind of interesting. What you folks did, and did brilliantly, quite frankly, is by enabling, putting in infrastructure, putting in the folks, the people who were needed to drive it, we created the Albany Nanotech Center. And now if you look up the Hudson Valley, in Fishkill, you have an immense facility cranking out R&D in silicon. But you go up to the Albany Nanotech Center and you have something that really is an example of how it needs to be done, because you're practicing in-sourcing. Which is really fairly incredible. Think about what you've achieved. Where you look around and you have people from Japan, Singapore, Korea, Germany, France, Italy. They all come here. And so you have to look and say, "What happened?" And what really uniquely happened is you've generated the very IP that was spoken of earlier in the introductions. You've generated that IP of such high value that it is simply more painful to go out and try to compete with it than to come and work with it. So people are coming in and they're coming in in quantity in order to leverage this. Then just north of that, of course, you have the investment of Global Foundry, which is an immense facility, that crank out state-of-the-art semiconductors. You have SemaTech that was based, in fact, in Texas. But when Texas Instruments about three, four years ago exited technology and declared it would no longer invest, SemaTech actually has, of course, moved into the Hudson Valley. It is a great exemplar and it's the beginning. Because you talk about the work in smart energy? You have the ability to do the same thing but, again, the only way it works is you basically have to attack that discontinuity and lead the way through it. There was a discontinuity in semiconductors where it became exponentially more expensive to move forward and we found a way past that. And that needs to be, I think, the strategy of really super-critical mass attacking a problem of major import. Bob Catell: Other members of the panel, please. David? David Hochman: Well, I'm here representing the venture-capital community. And I don't see a lot of us here so I'll let you all in on a little secret. Venture-capitalists are lazy. everyone laughs That's a little tongue-in-cheek but some of us are. I think that one of the great opportunities - I think it's an enormous challenge as venture-capitalists, and I've worked specifically in the medical device, medical technology arena. And one of the challenges for what you're looking to do here is that venture-capital is moving later and later stage and it's reflective of my earlier comment that's tongue-in-cheek. So I think there's an opportunity and a challenge for SUNY in this strategic initiative to look at ways to make, to engage investors, to engage talent and make the job a lot easier. It has tremendous resources and infrastructure. So part of the opportunities to organize that infrastructure, in part to take the ideas and innovations that can be developed within and package them and do a lot of the derisking work that makes it easier for an investor to come in and say, "I understand what my job is. I am going to take this from a fairly well thought- through plan to key value reflection points to try and make a return." Twenty, 30 years ago venture-capitalists would have to be mining what you have in your universities and doing a lot of that legwork. And today, frankly, a lot of the sources of capital don't want to do that. They're risk-averse and they want to take on opportunities that are better thought through. So I think a lot of what Bernard's saying is true, that you can organize both the talent within the university and the infrastructure and create systems where it's become so attractive to get engaged because what is handed off is something that is much more investable. Our firm specifically, and anything that's bucking a lot of that trend, we look to create companies. We're very early-stage and we engage, since we're focused in the medical arena, clinicians to try and understand needs and problems and then be active in creating solutions. And that's... frankly, we're kind of an anomaly I think in the venture-capital community. Maybe one of the reasons why Jim asked me to be here today. But I think that the universities, you can't rely on guys like us and groups like us moving in that direction. I think the trend is, unfortunately, the other direction. But in that is a gap that's a great opportunity where you can organize yourself to hand over something that's more investable. Bob Catell: Thank you, David. Jim? Yacov? Jim Weyhenmeyer: So I think certainly one of the key issues - and I had the good fortune to be in Washington last week at a Department of Commerce-sponsored event which was really looking at catalyzing economic growth and development through the translation of IP technology to market. And the audience, the group that assembled for that, was really a mix of individuals from industry, from the Academy, from government. Again, a high caliber group that came together to essentially have that conversation. One of the key things that came out of that meeting was one of relevance, and really how the Academy ultimately does relate to industry needs. And it's not obvious that we are always connected in a way that clearly is of value to industry. And it is something that goes beyond some of the easy things to talk about in terms of agreements that are difficult to work through, but really how we relate in terms of our early-stage discovery and development. How we relate to the needs of industry itself. I think, as Bernard said a few moments ago, when you look at Albany as one of the examples it does a phenomenal job in essentially relating to what the needs of that industry actually is and will be as it goes into the future. It is something that I think as we go through this process we need to begin to define how we better relate, if you will, are more relevant to in essence what, again, a small subset of sectors might look like. If you look across the system, there are certainly areas of incredible capacity with regard to the size, to the early discovery that we do, and in finding ways that... but, again, we communicate differently with industry in terms of, in essence, being the champions for our own activities, is something that I think clearly will help us as we look to the future. One of the interesting statistics that came out of this meeting was that over the last decade we've actually seen a decline. The peak in terms of industry- sponsored research was 7% to this decade. We've actually seen a decline over the 10 years, which now takes us under 5%. And again, it is this, as was mentioned earlier, this disconnect in terms of really being able to demonstrate that indeed what we are doing at our benches, at other facilities, if you will, within the system really does have significance in moving, whether it's a product or some other capacity, the moving it forward in a rapid fashion. I think that, again, SUNY is actually a model. I think that we have done things across many of our campuses which are clearly seen by others as state-of-the- art, as cutting edge, in terms of interfacing with industry. I think that's something that we obviously need not only to continue to do but something that we need to certainly expand in, particularly our capacity to, again, engage with more industry sectors as we go forward. Bob Catell: Yacov, you want to have the... Yacov Shamash: One of the things that we need to be cognizant of is that industry has needs that are not necessarily related to new IP being generated by the universities and therefore the need to start up companies. Industry also has needs, immediate needs over the next three months, six months, one year, two years. And there are various programs that we have in the SUNY system to try to address that. That's a very important part of economic development, is how do we retain the jobs that we currently have. It's easier to retain 100 jobs than it is to create a company with 10 people. So in terms of the way that the state looks at it, it's important for us to have new companies but it's also critically important that we keep the companies that we currently have and what is it that we can do to help out. Now SUNY is very rich in the number of programs that we have. Whether it's the CATs - and I think we have six or seven CATs within the SUNY system. We have four of the six Centers of Excellence that the state has in terms of research and frontier research work that we do. And the Nano Center being one, this facility is the second. As another we have one at Buffalo and we have one at Binghamton. We have the SPUR Program which was referred to which really works with companies in any one year - this is the four engineering schools... actually it's three engineering schools plus the Nano Center now - where we work with something like 200, 300 different companies on 400, 500 projects a year. Short-term projects, small-impact projects but critically important to those companies. We have SBDCs. We have 20 SBDCs within the SUNY system. The problem I think we have within SUNY is that these programs all exist at various locations and they don't talk to each other. We happen to talk clearly with the Nano Center. We talk with Buffalo, we talk with Binghamton. The four university centers tend to do quite a bit of that, certainly on the engineering side. I think the Schools of Medicine and the hospitals now are also collaborating and working together, leveraging their strengths. We could do so much more if we were able to essentially try to leverage those resources. The CATs working with each other, the Centers of Excellence working with each other, the SBDCs making referrals. We've had companies from Buffalo that have been told by the University of Buffalo they should contact us and work with us because we have the expertise. And we've done the same thing. If we did that with the 64 campuses we could really have a tremendous impact on the economic growth of this state. So I think we have a lot of the resources. We need to get them integrated and working together. Bob Catell: Thank you. Yacov kind of stole my second question which was what can the campuses do to work better together. So I think... Yacov Shamash: Sorry. Bob Catell: No, don't be sorry. I'm going to turn the question around a little bit. I think we've asked the question about what can the universities be doing. Is there anything industry can be doing to better foster this relationship. Are there incentives that industry can provide for the academic community which would encourage them more for this collaborative effort. So, you know, I come from industry so I'm very interested in that. And you, Jim, mentioned that industry is spending less, there's less being spent, as I heard you say, between industry and academia. So is there anything that can be done on the industry side of that ledger which could encourage a better relationship with academia. James Weyhenmeyer: Well, I think certainly one of the issues that has continued to surface inside the Academy is the one-sided IP relationship. And one that, clearly looking at either joint venture or something that ultimately does now define a relationship between both the faculty-researcher and the industry sector is something that clearly could incentivize in a very different way. I do think that there is great opportunity also for industry to be much more engaged in terms of understanding what the new frontiers actually are and what they will be as an agenda in any particular sector moves forward. So thinking of that, clearly, what is the industry intelligence ultimately that would help the Academy to better, again, engage and communicate in terms of what its capabilities actually are, I think is something that obviously would be helpful as we go forward. Bob Catell: Any other thoughts on that subject? Bernard, I know you've had some experience in this area and maybe you could relate to that a little bit. Bernard Meyerson: One of the challenges as you know is there's inevitably a contention between throwing open the doors and letting everybody look at what you're doing and keeping it to the point that you have some long-term financial advantage. A change that we made, a seminal shift, about two, three years ago actually in our strategy is, given the enormous success of Albany, which is sort of a model for how you share that incredible advance technology and yet at the same time don't end up inadvertently giving it away, so that everybody benefits the university immensely as well as the company. And the state particularly. What we've changed is we're using that as a model going forward so that what we used to call university relations in the prior life we're really calling university alliances. And the reason is, if you think about what happened at Albany we took a nucleus of incredibly talented researchers from the university, from within the IBM system, and we just produced something where the intellectual property was so compelling that it essentially took off. If you do that as your model of how you have a relationship, where you don't just give grants, you don't just have people go in but you have folks actually come into IBM from the universities on sort of an ambassador program, you have a paradigm where whatever funds you utilize at the university are utilized to attract an alliance of multiple players. Both start-ups who could leverage what's happening in that vein in a non-competitive manner, who can give you a route to market or multiple routes to market. This is really something that is a change in the paradigm. It's not just about throwing three post-docs at somebody and saying, "Have a good day." laughter That doesn't help. It's about establishing centers of excellence but that really drives a very tough question which I'd throw back at you. Which is, what are you not going to do? There is an infinite list of what we want to do. I can tell you IBM's biggest internal problem is not starting new and exciting programs. It's figuring out what not to do. So we pick the three that are going to be the killers. And we've had a very good track record actually of doing that as of late. If you look at whether it's Smarter Planet or whether you look at the open source movement, Linux, I mean, all of these things are fundamental paradigm shifts. We made good calls there. But to put the resources there to win we had to not do other things. Toughest thing you'll ever face. Part of working with the university is the same question. How do you get critical mass over an effort so it becomes that compelling entity that will attract your alliance partners. You can't just say, "Come on, we'll have fun." This is something where they've got to look at it and see a benefit. And so it's a very, very tough call how you change the paradigm to working as an alliance as opposed to just a funding agency. Bob Catell: Yacov, you wear at least two hats out here at Stony Brook. Probably more than that. And you've had a lot of experience and a lot of success in this area in working with the industry sector. What are your thoughts? Yacov Shamash: I think that there are two problems. It's convincing industry that the universities can actually help and can actually generate new ideas. And it's also convincing the faculty that it's in their best interests to work with industry. And you can do both. Of course. I think the Nano Initiative was, really IBM was a prime mover in that at the time. We have companies right now that are approaching us with ideas again. So which one do you do, which one don't you do? And it's important for industry to be aware of the core competencies that exist at SUNY. And I don't think they're aware of that right now. A company as large as IBM, yes, they will be aware because they have tentacles in most of the universities. There are companies on Long Island that didn't even know - this is 15 years ago, before I came - didn't know that we had an engineering school at Stony Brook, okay? You know, they get engrossed in what they're doing. They have to meet their quarterly results and, as you know, you want to see it all. So that's an issue. But I think from the university's perspective it's just as important for the faculty to work with industry. And what we have found is that faculty now are a lot more receptive, in fact they're eager, to work with industry because that enables them not only to do things for industry but it also helps build their research infrastructure on the campus through funding from the federal government. More and more the federal government, in terms of their major initiatives, they're looking for multidisciplinary approaches to problems, multi-campus, multi- investigator. They want to see industry in there. And by having those relationships with industry, you go in with a proposal and you have five or six companies going in with you saying, "Hey, you know, if this technology comes about..." or this science or this drug, "...we are willing to commercialize it." That's absolutely critical. So I think it's both sides. Bob Catell: David, from your perspective on this subject, you represent industry and are very successful. What do you look for when you look at research institutions where you'd like to collaborate and do your thing? David Hochman: Well, I think one of the things that we need and we're looking for is leverage. You know, if you're looking at start-up companies, by contrast to other forms of private equity investment, the only leverage we can get is talent and intellectual property. Our capital is dollar for dollar. We can't go out and get debt to leverage our capital. And so I think that the early-stage investors are very attracted to universities because of, well, on one hand, because there's a source of technology and IP. But I think there is a great opportunity to create relationships. And I think we have to be willing to come to the table in a shared responsibility, shared reward construct to get additional leverage. Universities have not just talent but facilities, equipment; in the medical arena, the ability to collaborate in the development whether it's in clinical construct of new technologies. That can be very attractive. But it also can be frustrating perhaps to try and form those kind of relationships with the university because of the layers that you may need to go through and because of the time it may take to form those relationships. So I think we have to be willing to come to the table with the clear explanation of what our needs are, what our objectives are, and be open-minded to listen as well to what the university's needs and objectives are. I think those relationships, whether it's on a one-off or, more ideally, within a framework that can be repeatable, can be very powerful if they're done right. James Weyhenmeyer: Bob, could I add one other thing. So before coming to SUNY I actually had the opportunity to participate in what is still the largest sponsored research award that has been made from industry to the Academy. So this was British Petroleum that had open competition. In essence it was global so that anyone from anyplace in the world could essentially apply for this opportunity. And what BP did in that process - again, the size of that award was a half a billion dollars over 10 years. So it continues to this day to be the largest single research award that has been granted. But I think what was different about that is the way that BP essentially did the construct. And that was to go out and use, in essence, a federal model for how you would run an open competition, getting the very best institutions - whether they were from the U.S. or from somewhere else on the globe - but the very best institutions to ultimately participate in that process. What came together as part of that were three institutions, Lawrence Berkeley, U. Cal. Berkeley, and the University of Illinois, as the three entities that ultimately did win that at the end of the day. But it's a very different paradigm in terms of what is typically done and, again, trying to break through that mold and do something that's different that really does have a different value proposition as well. Bob Catell: Thank you. I have a lot more questions that I could ask but at this point we really would like to ask the audience, because you folks are the ones that are going to be doing the work afterwards to come up with some recommendations. So why don't I open it up to the audience and see if you have any questions for the panel. Yes. Why don't you just say who you are and, I don't know if we have a microphone to... we do have a microphone coming. Scott Tenenbaum: I'm Scott Tenenbaum and I work at Nano. So, along with everything I hear, I'm going to point out a present limitation that I'd like to hear some feedback on. So when you get into industrial partnerships, when you start pushing out intellectual property, and you're a junior faculty member, your promotion package looks fundamentally different than what is traditional. And I'd like to hear some thoughts on how that can become institutionalized. In other words, I've got patent applications instead of papers. And the two are polar opposites. You intentionally hold back publishing so you can protect your IP. So the two don't go hand in hand and that's an inherent limitation that's really getting this engine to go. Bob Catell: And it's an excellent question. I'd like to hear from the panel. Yacov Shamash: Since I've had to deal with that a few times, I guess, it is an issue. And you do have to look at every case individually. You can't channelize policies and say, "Okay, if you have so many patents or so many papers..." as you know, that's not the way that things work. But we do look at the whole package. What creativity, what innovation, the letters of support that the individual has, the effort that they have built up. And I think there have been changes already in the academic world. It used to be that if you obtained grants from industry, that was brown money. If you got it from federal agencies, it was green money. Green was good. Brown was bad. I think that has to a large extent disappeared. Because, as you know, it's a lot harder to get money out of a company, because that comes out of their bottom line, than it is to get it out of the federal grant. But you can't really generalize and say, "Yes, every case, go ahead and get three patents." Now I'll tell you, one of my department chairs is absolutely explicit. He would much rather have patents than papers. He would like to see for every Ph.D. that's generated to have at least one patent essentially having been filed and accepted. So I think we are beginning to accept that there needs to be changes. And I must say that faculty has been very receptive to that. But if it's a weak case, it's going to be a weak case. If it's a strong cause, it's going to be strong. So I know that I... not very specific, but with promotion antennae we always dance around. everyone laughs Bob Catell: Other thoughts? Bernard? Bernard Meyerson: For years, I've chaired or led or resided on the Board that promotes IBM's technical executives - we have a parallel track so there's a lot of movement back and forth - where we promote executives to the ranks of what's called Distinguished Engineer, IBM Fellow, etc. And over the years we faced this question because the nature of a researcher has changed dramatically over the last 30 years. And so what we've done is, we actually sat back, then we said, "Wait a minute. If the researchers have changed, how about those who drive the business side? That's changed, too." On a fairly regular basis, what we do is we roll out... we actually sit back and ask ourselves, "Are the skills needed the same?" And the answer is, by the way, no, of course not. And you're on a very good point which is, there's no one recipe nowadays. So what we've done is, we go back and reissue what we'll call our Leadership Competencies which were perhaps the five or 10 fundamental tenets of behavior we look for in an individual. For instance, the ability to function in an uncertain global environment. That is just, today... 30 years ago that just wasn't an issue. You may be an international company but that meant that you had offices in six countries. Well, now you have 150 offices in 150 countries and, oh, by the way, they all have to work together. That is global. It's integrated. The same thing with patents, same things with publications. We have people who, in fact, didn't publish or patent. Why? Because trade secret. The problem with a patent is you have to write down the best instantiation. And if you actually believe that you can't defend that, then you might as well not tell anybody. But then not to promote them is ludicrous. These are people who did something so precious you don't want to talk about. laughter And so you're absolutely on the right point. However, however, it was said well. A strong package is the integration of the whole not any one metric. There is no litmus test that works any longer because it's so different. In the medical field where people practice blocking patents versus an open software where you'd rather shoot yourself in the foot. And then the other foot so you wouldn't limp. laughter So there is no recipe. You can't be that formalistic anymore. And what it means is people actually have to take the promotion process, quite frankly, a heck of a lot more seriously. We do it now on an incredibly rigorous basis with multiple... we, literally, assign a single executive to do a deep dive on every person brought forward. And they'll call 20, 30, 40 different people and really dig. Because you can't put it on a piece of paper anymore. So you're on a great point, which is the world has evolved and our processes for promoting people have to evolve with it. David Hochman: I also - and I'll admit, in this regard I'm wading into territory very unfamiliar to me - but I will say that in terms of what's important to us, I think there's other metrics that need to be added. So it's not just how many papers published or how many patents filed but how many patents licensed. Or if it's important for the university to have commercial partnerships, to see technology developed here that becomes part of commercial enterprises, start-ups, or big companies, I think there has to be metrics added to the line of did this individual participate in forming or facilitating that partnership. Clearly, there may be different metrics if you do that kind of activity that have nothing to do with promotion. You may be able to get financial remuneration that's not available within the university system. So there's going to be a trade-off. And I know that exists. I just want to mention another issue, particularly germane to our field which is the growing issue within medicine and new technology or technology development. Conflict of interest. And this is a problem that's getting way out of hand. And I'm sure it's an issue that you deal with here. You know, you wouldn't want to go and board an airplane that was the newest Boeing airplane without knowing that a pilot hadn't been an active participant in the development of the airplane. That had tested it from the earliest stages and throughout. Same with medical technology. I don't want to get the newest stent or - fortunately, I'm not a candidate for a stent - but I'm sure any of you wouldn't, without knowing that the best interventional cardiologist had been involved in that development. In our current environment, it's increasingly difficult for those people to be involved. And to get the kind of incentives that are just normal for people. You know, you help develop something that's valuable, you want to participate in the value. That's something that needs to be rationalized by the universities if you're going to be an active player in commercialization of technologies developed within that environment. Bob Catell: Good comment. Anything else? James Weyhenmeyer: So, Scott, maybe just a tangible thing. Again, at this forum that was convened about a week ago, one of the outcomes was to really look at now a mechanism for convening university chancellors and presidents to have this very conversation. And whether that is through the administration, it's under the umbrella of NAS, it is through one of the associations - AAU, APLU, so on and so forth - but to have this conversation. It was clear that this risk reward mechanism is something that is very much on the minds of people that, again, are looking for ways to move this particular dynamic. Bob Catell: Great. Take another question from the audience. Yes. Don Siegel: Thank you. My name is Don Siegel and I'm the Dean of the School of Business at the University of Albany, and the editor of The Journal of Technology Transfer. And my question to the panelists relates... this builds on Scott's point about incentives for academic entrepreneurship. And that is, if we're formulating a strategic plan we have to be honest about the weaknesses that we have. And having taught at two other state universities, I think we are very weak in the area of entrepreneurship in terms of courses and programs and stimulating academic entrepreneurship. And I was wondering if the panelists had any reflections on how we can improve this. We realize, as Scott said, that part of it is an incentive problem but part of it is the fact that we don't have a lot of courses and programs and training for people who have an interest in commercialization but don't know how to deal with people like David and those in the business community. So I was just wondering if you had any thoughts about that. David Hochman: I'll jump in. I think this is a tremendous opportunity for SUNY and I think there's some good paradigms that can be looked at that have been successful at other universities within the medical device arena. Stanford has a phenomenal program out of the School of Biomedical Engineering which is a multidisciplinary program where students, mainly graduate students, can get involved in really creating start-ups within the university environment and do things that I think are very atypical that you'd see in terms of a university environment. And then some pretty exciting technologies come out of that. So I think it's attractive to create curriculum for students - whether they're undergrads, more likely graduate students - to be able to have practical hands- on experience in not just maybe their narrow aspect of what is involved in developing a new technology or a new business but to have exposure to all the other aspects of what goes into making that work and creating multidisciplinary programs for the students and for the faculty. And it's very attractive to folks like us. Because at the end of the day it's one of those aspects of leverage. And we're trying to get the best talent, and to do that at a very cost-effective way all throughout the development of a new company. Particularly in those early stages. So the idea of partnering with a team that involves maybe faculty but also involves students, where part of what we have to bring to the table is an aspect of the education. What is it that is entailed in actually making this work. And I think programs like that are beginning to be developed and can be developed here part and parcel to what you're doing. And I think it's a big opportunity. Bob Catell: Yacov, did you want to...? Thank you, David. Yacov Shamash: You're absolutely right. And about three years ago I think, we at Stony Brook started a program similar to the MIT form where we actually have students compete for grant monies. I think we give out, Ann Marie, about $50,000 a year right now? Ann Marie Scheidt: $50,000 a year. Yacov Shamash: $50,000 a year. And we also offer the winning, top two teams, we offer them free incubator space for one year for them to actually develop the ideas. And then we have courses also but I think this kind of competition, and it's both graduate and undergraduates that participate, has worked very well. One of those companies... actually I just received an e-mail just two days ago saying that they have actually received financing from venture-capitalists, $2 million. They won the competition about three years ago. And to do something, you know, maybe what we could do is actually to do something that SUNY-wide. And have SUNY essentially lead that. I think that might be an idea. But we certainly need to do more of that. Bob Catell: Thank you. Other comments on that? Bernard Meyerson: Just speaking from the industry side, we actually recognized the problem that we get folks in and these kids many times, frankly, have no clue how you would get started. You're right, it's missing at the present. So we started a program we call Extreme Blue. Where people who have this interest, basically usually grad students or late-stage seniors, are invited to come in and they participate in what amounts to essentially an entrepreneurial boot camp. And in the course of roughly eight to 12 weeks they literally have to go from nothing to a product. And we'll throw a lot of resources and a lot of executives at it to coach them through the exercise. And we find that through the process of doing that, really light a fire in folks who previously had no understanding of how amazing it is to take a concept out to product in a span of a matter of months. And it's not trivial. They've done some amazing stuff. But there needs to be more of that. It is a missing element in the people who come to the company, and something we've resorted, frankly, to reaching out to Babson University which has a program on entrepreneurship, HBS, RPI had, part of the Lally School. I mean, there are a bunch of places we've gone to get help and it is something, frankly, that you would get tremendous benefit from I believe for the student population and ultimately the university. Bob Catell: I think we have time for one more question from the audience. This gentleman here has been anxious to get the microphone. Paul Agris: Thank you. Like the other two speakers I'm at Albany but only a quarter of my time. I'm really from North Carolina State University so I bring perspective of another state to the conference. I'd like to make one comment and then ask a question. The comment is relative to what Don just said. And that is about instilling entrepreneurship in our students. And unfortunately, coming from the Life Sciences, and a person who spun off two companies over the last 10 years, I can tell you that the mindset of the Life Science professor is that you do science, you don't do technology. And that's quite different than coming out of the engineering fields with possibly the exception of prosthetics and so forth in the medical industry. And so in my mind we have to look at our young professors as well as our old successful professors and we have to give them a new mindset as to what their students should be doing. Not only that thinking about science creates technology but also inherent in our courses need to be a little bit of entrepreneurship as well as having entrepreneurship curricula available to these students. Now the other thing I would like to say has something to do with, Bob, I believe you said earlier, and that was that maybe we don't have to reinvent the wheel for Albany and for the rest of the SUNY system - which I joined permanently in May - and that is to look at other states that have been successful with programs. And I'd like to point out one of them, North Carolina, in the medical and biological sciences with their North Carolina Biotechnological Center, which some of you may be aware of. And its ability to fund and also to provide the incentives for faculty within that state to be creative and innovative in the biological sciences. So the question is, should we be looking at other states and how successful they have been in creating the incentives for new companies and spinouts from universities. Bob Catell: Thank you. Okay. A question. Yacov? Yacov Shamash: I'll take it, I guess. Our bioscience faculty have actually been fairly aggressive in terms of trying to commercialize technology. About 30-40% of the projects in this building are medically related, bio related. Some of our very successful companies in the incubator have been started out by faculty from the School of Medicine. That doesn't mean that we don't need to... this is clearly just one institution. I think we should certainly look at what other systems have done but we should also look within the SUNY system and see where we've had some successes, and how did we accomplish that, and can we scale that up to the whole system. But it's certainly doable. Bob Catell: Other comments on this issue? Examples that... David Hochman: You know, clearly, I think you should look at any successful model. Whether it's at a different university or within a state construct, and try and take the best that would apply here. I just want to make a commentate to your comment. And I think it's one of the things that's going to be challenging and it's interesting to participate. As the universities that have enabled the development of key fundamental scientific discoveries that later on become enabling to commercial products focus on commercialization in order to bring in funding, the worry is that, like corporate America has been quarter to quarter very short-sighted, the university becomes short-sighted. So I think you have to balance this effort with a continued focus on fostering that kind of basic scientific research without which the applied research, the product development, is not possible. And going back to the question of metrics and what-not, some of those metrics need to be kept in place. And some people who do that really well have to be incentivized to continue to do it. So that's a key concern. Bob Catell: Thank you. Bernard? Bernard Meyerson: I have a similar view but with a adder which is, what we found to be very, very successful is people start their careers very often in the fundamentals of science. But they cycle through the process. Many times when they have a success they don't throw it over the wall - that's almost assuredly the way to kill it - but rather they go with it. Now many times, I'll be honest, we have to staple somebody to them who has far better business sense than they did. But if you do it right, you don't let them withdraw. You actually go through the whole process of taking it out to market and then do a reset. And we've had people cycle through this process of fundamental discovery - you know, the "Aha!" moment - to, "Good lord, it's now a hundred million products out there in the field," and then cycle back to do it over and over again. I've seen people do that cycle - and it's a very virtuous one - two, three, four times. The problem is, when people get pigeonholed, so they're just fundamental science or they're just entrepreneur, it doesn't work as well. So there is that sense of there should be mobility. And that's a tough one because many times an institution becomes set in its ways and people become set with it. So you want so dynamism in the system that many times is missing. It is a hard thing to achieve. There's no simple recipes for that. Yacov Shamash: May I just add one short note to that in terms of faculty and faculty participation. SUNY has probably one of the best royalty arrangements for faculty that exists in this country. It's an incredibly good one. And so in terms of financial rewards, the faculty really have a terrific plan in place. James Weyhenmeyer: Not one of the best, it is the best. It is. It is. It is. Yacov Shamash: I didn't want to get ---_____. Sam Stanley: Unfortunately, we're out of time and we don't want to... we could go on a lot longer and I knew the hour was going to fly by as it has. But the gentlemen will be around, hopefully, so if any of you would like to talk to them at the coffee break, we're going to take a coffee break now for about 15 minutes. But I would just like to conclude by thanking the members of the panel. Excellent comments, excellent jobs. applause Bob Catell: I think we've all learned a lot this morning. Our challenge is going to be to put it to work and make it work. So thank you again and now we're going to take about a 15-minute coffee break, Dr. Stanley says 15 minutes, and then come back for our second panel which is going to talk about how do we fund some of these activities. Thank you. Sam Stanley: So before we start our next panel discussion I just wanted to acknowledge somebody. For those of you who, like me, are new to Long Island, it may be difficult to understand the government on Long Island. There are many hamlets, villages, townships, etc. But the one big township is the township of Brookhaven, which encompasses both Stony Brook University as well as Brookhaven National Laboratory. It has a population, I think, in excess of 400,000 or something. And the supervisor for the township of Brookhaven is joining us today as well, and that's Mark Lesko. Mark, thank you so much for joining us this morning. applause So our next panel discussion is going to be on Growing Federal Support. Something obviously very vital and I'm very pleased that Jack Marburger from Stony Brook University, who is a former president of Stony Brook University, a former director of Brookhaven National Laboratory, as well as a former adviser to President Bush and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, will be moderating. I'll let Jack introduce the panelists. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Marburger. applause John Marburger: Thanks very much, Sam. I'm really delighted to be here this morning to talk about the federal end of our research enterprise, and talk with our panelists about how we might use the extraordinary assets of SUNY to grow federal support for our campuses and to join federal support to our economic development efforts as well. Before I say anything, I will introduce our panelists. As a matter of fact, I think Sam has already mentioned that Sam Aronson, the Director of Brookhaven National Laboratory, had family issues that had to be attended to and he will not join us. However, I feel comfortable, he delegated me to speak on behalf of Brookhaven National Laboratory. I was the Director there for several years but it seems like a long time ago now. But I will speak to that when the time comes. On my immediate left is Mr. Joe Sarrubi who operates Tec-Smart at Hudson Valley Community College. I'm going to be asking him some questions about that in just a minute. But he toured President Obama, on his visit to Hudson Valley, to show him how a community college could be a major player in contributing and adding value to the innovation ecology in the state. And I'm just so glad that he was willing to be on our panel. Joe is also a journeyman electrician certified by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Engineers and Electrical Workers. And it's great to have somebody with your experience - I think something like 35 years of experience - in this venue. On his left is Interim Provost at State University of New York, Dr. David Lavallee. A chemist, a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and former collaborator at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He's been around other DOE, Department of Energy, laboratories as well. Dr. Lavallee is nationally recognized for his leadership in science education. He was provost and senior vice-president at City College. He has experience with City University of New York as well as his post at New Paltz. And to his left is Dr. David Heath, President of the SUNY College of Optometry. Which occupies very nice headquarters in New York City, I might add. It's a wonderful office there to go and visit. He came to SUNY in 2007. A researcher and an educator recognized nationally for leadership in optometric education, and part of a very interesting program now that joins together a number of institutions we'll hear about in ophthalmology. Also David has extensive experience in China working to improve the quality of eye care providers in China. Which is an interesting new dimension. And Dr. Bruce Stillman, at the end of the row, has been a scientist at Cold Spring Harbor since 1979. Director of the Cancer Center there. He became the Director of the laboratory in 1994 and president in 2003. He is renowned for his DNA research. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and other prestigious organizations. And very active in Washington organizations including the National Academy, the NIH panels, and so forth. And very familiar with the huge machinery of biomedical research in the U.S. and abroad. So we have an expert panel. I look forward to hearing their comments. I'm going to open with just a few remarks about the federal budget, which is a driver for the things that we would like to do. We would like to have partnerships with the federal government. We'd like to benefit from their desire to enhance the economic development, economic competitiveness of our country. And there's certainly a growing awareness in Washington of the importance of university- based research as seeds for economic development and innovation and long- term competitiveness. Let me just give you a few facts to provide the background here for federal R&D spending. Federal R&D spending is dominated by five big agencies. About half of R&D is D and nearly all of that is in the Defense Department and its development of weapons systems. So I'm going to talk about the other half. The other half is R, and the R of R&D in our country is split. About half goes to NIH. So nearly half of all research funded by the federal government is funded through NIH and, frankly, it represents the largest single sponsor of university- based research. The other four big agencies are the National Science Foundation - not surprising - NASA, Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense, the research side of the Department of Defense side which is about the same size as those other agencies. So half the money comes through NIH, the other half is split among five. The four that I mentioned - NASA, NSF, Department of Energy, Department of Defense - plus others. And each one of those five, including the other, has about an equal share of the other half of the research dollars that come out of the federal government. I just wanted to give you that big picture. All of these budgets come out of the discretionary part of the budget. The discretionary part is what's left over after we pay our mandatory bills for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and, increasingly, interest on the national debt. And I need to talk about that in just a minute. We all need to worry about what's going on. The domestic discretionary budget, the non-mandatory part of the budget, is divided about equally between defense and everything else. So the everything else includes all of the science budgets. The defense part, which supports a lot of research in engineering and technology, is the most volatile component of that. The non-defense part, and especially the non- defense part of the science research budget, is a relatively constant fraction of the discretionary budget. The non-defense discretionary budget. So let me repeat that. Non-defense research is approximately 11-12% of the non-defense discretionary budget year after year after year. So what that means is that the top line research budget that's coming from the federal government in the non- defense area is actually very predictable. If you know what the discretionary budget is going to look like, you can guess pretty accurately what the total for basic research, scientific research will look like. It's an important empirical fact. Well, that portion of the budget is under enormous pressure. The federal budget's currently distorted by stimulus spending to mitigate the effects of the great recession; looks like it's been largely successful. The economy has been saved, as it were, by that stimulus spending. But agencies that saw their budgets soar during the past year are now preparing to downsize in response to strong sentiment in Congress and among voters to deal with the exploding budget deficit. The stimulus funds came from borrowing, and borrowing is expensive. The interest on the national debt is estimated to more than double as a percent of the GDP in the SUNY strategic planning period between 2010 and 2015. By 2015, the interest on the national debt is projected to cost $383 billion more than it does today. Interest payments will be by far the most rapidly growing part of the federal budget, outpacing Social Security and Medicare. And by 2015 it will be comparable to the entire cost of Medicare. About 3% of GDP compared with about three points, 4% of GDP for Medicare projected in 2015. These numbers are sobering and they bode ill for the discretionary budget, which is the only part of the budget that's easy to cut. And that's the part of the budget that contains the R&D budgets. In 2008, the entire discretionary budget was $1.1 trillion. The entire discretionary budget was $1.1 trillion in 2008. By 2020, the Obama Administration estimates interest on the debt to $912 billion. So the interest that we have to pay on the debt - and this is constant dollars that is corrected for inflation - the amount that we pay on the debt will nearly equal the entire discretionary budget before the recession. Something has to give. Current spending plans show discretionary funding falling from about 38% of the budget in 2010 to 27% of the budget in 2020. The share of the budget devoted to discretionary budget has to fall because the mandatory part including the interest rates are going up. So the discretionary budget will grow. It's projected to grow by about 13% over the next decade which nevertheless will be below the expected inflation rate. So in the short term, the next five years, the Administration's budget plan now before Congress - the President's budget proposal to Congress that he released in January - will produce a discretionary budget lower in inflation in adjusted dollars than today's and every successive year. In other words, starting in the next budget cycle after this one, the agencies are projected to get less and less. During that period, interest payments on the debt will increase by over 200%. To take just two specific examples of impacts on R&D spending, consider the projected budgets for NIH, which is the big research sponsor, and the Department of Energy's energy programs, which are important to us and to New York State. Both budgets, for NIH and Department of Energy energy programs, spiked significantly during the stimulus and they will remain high in 2011. The President has asked for follow-on funds that will continue to provide stimulus. But starting in 2012, NIH and DOE energy budgets will fall off precipitously. When adjusted for inflation, the NIH budget will be about $1.5 billion less in 2015 than in the pre-stimulus 2008. Energy programs at the Department of Energy actually will fare a little bit better than the NIH budget but, of course, still well below the stimulus levels. So that's the bad news. We really have to keep our eye on what Congress does with the debt and working to chew down on this very alarming deficit that people are so concerned about and is driving politics throughout the country. The good news is that both the Administration and Congress seem to have bought into the idea that investments in research and development are important for a competitive economy. They've bought that. In the final decades of the last century we were still concerned about the Cold War-type science budgets driven by national security issues - and perhaps in the last decade homeland security issues - but now it's clear that the driver is economic security and competitiveness and innovation. The Obama Administration is continuing to fund some of the initiatives that were begun in the Bush Administration, doubling the NSF budget, doubling the budget for the Department of Energy Office of Science, doubling a much smaller budget for NIST which is nevertheless important for us all, and some other initiatives that were begun in the last Administration. That's continuing although the doubling period for NSF has been stretched out by a year and we worry about whether it will be stretched out continuously. There's a new ARPA-E, Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Department of Energy that's been funded, and Congress seems to be willing to continue to fund that. Unfortunately, in the first round of grants from the new ARPA-E program, not a cent came to New York State. It's something that we can work on. There's a real opportunity for us there I think. Because I do believe that program has legs and will continue to be funded. What will happen to the NIH budget after 2012 really depends on what happens in Congress. The mood of Congress. Congress really likes NIH, especially the National Cancer Institute. You may recall that in the closing hours of the debate in Congress on the stimulus measure, very large amounts of monies - more than $6 billion on top of the $3.5 billion the President asked for - was added to the NIH budget by Congress. So something like that could happen again. But the current projections by the Obama Administration are that after 2012, the NIH budget will drop. In other federal funding areas there has been a very interesting growing awareness of the importance of community colleges in the entire ecology of innovation for the nation. And both the Bush and the Obama Administrations have developed new programs, mostly out of the Department of Education, for strengthening these aspects of two-year colleges and community colleges. And despite the gloomy projections, there's nevertheless a lot of R&D money on the table. And New York's institutions are both currently and potentially very competitive for this. Healthcare, translational medicine, home healthcare technologies, continued introduction of information technology in the delivery of health care, they're all likely to continue to receive strong federal support with a strong emphasis on reducing overall costs. I mean, that's where the focus will be. And any ideas we have about how that can be done are likely to get some attention. Defense research, too, is a promising area despite the fact that defense spending is going to go down and the Pentagon budget is going to go down. Remember that their R&D budget was dominated by development costs of new weapons systems. And to the extent that there can be even small transfers from the D to the R, the Pentagon funded research, university-based research which supports engineering and technology programs, could be a beneficiary. The current Secretary of Energy is very positively disposed towards research and there are opportunities there. It's not something that universities have traditionally embraced in the past, but many research universities today, and other institutions as well, have benefited a great deal from the needs that the Defense Department has to train its people and have new ideas. So whatever the detailed federal budgets are in the future, I believe that New York State, and SUNY campuses in particular, have untapped potentials for federal funding. We haven't taken full advantage of our very substantial assets including the SUNY and CUNY institutions and the highly-regarded and productive research establishments in this state, including Brookhaven National Lab and Cold Spring Harbor. All of which are represented on our panel today. So thanks for joining us. I'd like to thank the panel members for joining us today. And I'd like to start with Joe. Joe, I was just astonished at the ability of Hudson Valley Community College to couple into some of these assets that we have in SUNY and get lots of visibility. And also, apparently, to make a big mark in the state. Could you just explain a little bit to us about what you did and how that worked? Joe Sarrubi: Sure. John Marburger: And a little bit about Tec-Smart. Joe Sarrubi: And I'll certainly talk a little bit about Tec-Smart in a little bit. But keying in on some of the things that you mentioned earlier. You know, the beginning plenary here there was a lot of talk on research, R&D, and not a lot of conversation at this point on jobs, jobs, jobs. Jobs training, skills for our workforce. And I'd like to say that's probably been my lifelong goal and dream and work really at the community college level for the last 30 years, is focusing on getting people jobs. And Hudson Valley, yes, has been able to tap into that federal resource and also state resource because we really started kind of a grassroots effort, and I'll share that in a moment. But when I think about the research institutions like Stony Brook, and Albany, and Buffalo, Binghamton and all, and they've done phenomenal jobs in creating innovations. And, of course, a big focus then of the universities is to how do we commercialize those innovations. How do we take that thing that we just developed and bring it to something that we can actually make and put out into market. But on top of that, a big key to that is a skilled workforce. Who's going to install it? Who's going to maintain it? Who's... troubleshoot it, work with it. And I see that's where the community colleges can really support the four-year institutions at a level that we really haven't been doing a good enough job at at this point. We're there. It's almost like we've been kind of that bridesmaid for all these years to the universities in New York, and now we have an opportunity at the community college level to really support a lot of this stuff, the innovations that are going on. We've started that at Hudson Valley with what I call the grassroots level. We started with NYSERDA and some of the funding that we focused on procuring by building partnerships all across the state. By going out and meeting with the other schools. It took effort to get out there, meet with the other institutions, sit down face to face, have conversations, and get to the point that there's a confidence level that we can pull this off together. And I think we can do that even at a more federal level. The same thing happened with the latest grant that we received from the Department of Energy, $3.5 million. I had a long conversation with the Department of Energy people afterwards. "Why did we get this? How did we get this? How did we stack up against other people? I wanted to know what was involved in that decision-making process." And the bottom line was confidence. Confidence that we could pull this off. And I think that's going to go a long way as far as we move forward and we have a great opportunity with SUNY. And, of course, with having the opportunity now to bring on Chancellor Zimpher, which is bringing that whole 'nother level of credibility to SUNY, and now with our statewide plan I think we've got a great opportunity to really maximize on that right now. Especially at a time when our state government is in flux a little bit, we have a chance in SUNY to really kind of bring things to the next level and become that leader. And I think it starts with confidence. And the confidence that the other institutions had with Hudson Valley is that they felt that we could deliver together as a team. And it started really as a grassroots level. Going down, shaking hands, kind of that Fuller brush go-into-the-door, let's talk it out. everyone laughs Right? Let's make it happen. And we're so much on e-mail anymore and if it's great with technology, we're all about technology, but that face to face really invoked confidence. And the more we develop that partnership... I think about a couple of years ago, I really never communicated with Stony Brook, being all the way down on Long Island. And the relationships that we have right now are with Stony Brook. And we're developing collaborations. We've gotten together. We're traveling down to Stony Brook. Stony Brook is coming up to Hudson Valley. We're doing that with Albany locally right now. And I'll speak more on this later but I think going back to the original question is that grassroots effort of getting an opportunity for us to talk and invoking confidence. That, SUNY. What does that name mean and that brand, SUNY. That the country's confident in that particular state that we can pull this off. So it's the grassroots effort. John Marburger: Great. That's great. David Lavallee, you've had your fingers in New York State educational pies and a number... David Lavallee: Quite a while. John Marburger: ...of different systems and places. How does it look from where you're sitting now in Albany? David Lavallee: Well, I think that we have a great potential that we haven't tapped in terms of what we can do as a system. So that we can facilitate the kind of thing that Joe just talked about. That you don't have to do that yourself in going to the campus, that we can begin to have structures in place to do that. I think that there are two or three ways in which we can aid researchers. And the typical research that's going to probably still always be the mainstay is going to be the individual researcher who has a great idea, writes a proposal, gets a grant, and does the work. But more and more we're seeing joint ventures and collaborative ventures being incredibly important. So on both sides of that I think where we could facilitate the individual researchers and gain more federal dollars would be to begin to develop and use more broadly the very expensive big infrastructure areas. Where it's instrumentation that can be used by a lot of different researchers or where it's a facility, like Nano, that can house a lot of researchers. One example we're doing now is New York Structural Biology Center, with magnetic resonance and electron microscopy. And I think that there are other ways in which those kind of platforms can be increased. The second is perhaps to focus some on those other agencies, other than the big five, where we have not really exhausted our potential to get funding. So that if we look at those other agencies like the Department of Education, the social science areas of Health and Human Services, the National Institute for Standards and Testing that John mentioned, NIST, and EPA, there is a lot of money out there. You put them all together it's as big as NSF. But we don't go after an awful lot of that. And one of the reasons is that the researchers that are working in those areas often are productive, they're skilled, they have a great deal of expertise, but they don't really get into grantsmanship the way that scientists and health individuals do. And we may need to support that grantsmanship. That is, to help those faculty get together to have a viable coalition that can go after a large grant and, at the same time, to provide the sponsored program office that already exists at a large institution so that some of those other institutions can have that administrative support. And the last thing I'd just like to mention quickly is I think that we have a role in terms of what I would call gap analysis. And that is that we can look at areas of research nationally that are being supported where we really do have potential if we put it together, but it's not being done now. And that it's a right place for SUNY to fill part of that gap. The second one, and this is something that Don Siegel mentioned with regard to curriculum, is looking at where are we really missing? Where we don't have the faculty or the facilities to approach major problems. And maybe that's an area that we should emphasize for hiring and for building coalitions. And we've seen some of this in areas that when we've tried to address with our legislature, when we say, "Well, what do you know about what really works in that area? And why should we invest in SUNY to do that?" And we need to have those answers. We need to fill that gap. John Marburger: Great. Well, the answers might be sitting right next to you. laughter We have some very interesting collaborative efforts in the health science areas. And Dr. Heath, maybe you can tell us a little bit about those. David Heath: Well, I mentioned, many in the room - some perhaps could speak about this more eloquently than I will - but many in the room are familiar or have heard of the SUNY REACH Program. SUNY REACH is an overarching program among the academic medical centers - Optometry has gotten involved as well - to really look at the collaborative power of us as a system. SUNY REACH was initially begun actually before Chancellor Zimpher joined us and I guess in some ways, from a strategic planning standpoint, it's one of those big hairy audacious ideas that perhaps was out of the barn before the door was even open. So certainly from my perspective I'm hoping to... John Marburger: It's called quantum tunneling, actually. everyone laughs David Heath: That could take a while, couldn't it? John Marburger: Yes. David Heath: But to give you a little bit of more of a microcosm, part of that effort is to really build a research consortium among the medical centers built upon four particular pillars. Within that proposal it included cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, disorders of the nervous system, infectious disease, and emerging pathogens. But even prior to that beginning it was built a little bit upon some more grassroots efforts. And I think it's absolutely critical that we realize that any initiative that we begin as a system has to be built upon the energies and the interests of the individual researchers. It's not going to succeed without that kind of commitment to perhaps the greater good. But the five campuses, the four academic medical centers and Optometry, as well as the Research Foundation, contributed to begin some initial programs that had certainly gotten going. One of those is the SUNY Eye Institute, and I'll just sort of give you perhaps a little bit of an overview to give some insights into the potential of collaboration. I think there are several people here who are leading that - Bill Brunken, David Troilo, I think Doug Lazzaro is here somewhere - who can certainly talk at the tables about it. But the SUNY Eye Institute is effectively a virtual research effort, bringing the four departments of ophthalmology and the College of Optometry together. Those groups combined have over 50 researchers involved in vision research. Approximately 30, 31, 32 federal grants. And actually we were talking over the break, and I believe the numbers even just in the downstate area, between Downstate, the College of Optometry, and Stony Brook, we have over a quarter-million patients at our disposal for translational research purposes. Now you take this kind of brain power, you take this kind of grant potential, you break it out into five individual campuses and it's not nearly as impressive. But you bring it together and I think it's a resource that can be highly leveraged both with the federal government as well - as I was very intrigued by the panel discussion this morning - but with industry as well in terms of potential for fundamental discovery but also product development in clinical trials work. So if you look at what our capabilities are together, the attractiveness to major grant opportunities, to innovative opportunities with the federal government as well as with other agencies, becomes just all that more powerful. It's a fledgling initiative. The other ones that are started up are three in neuroscience as well as a collaborative clinical trials organization among the campuses. And these are going on. They are the pilots for this type of a collaboration. John Marburger: Fantastic. So Bruce, you've been watching SUNY grow over decades. You are sitting on top of the world's most prestigious biology laboratory, research laboratory. You're located sort of in the downstate area. And I've seen Cold Spring Harbor, just since I came to Long Island 20 years, increase its outlook, broaden its horizons, and build up its federal support. We'd all like to hear from you what the opportunities are for you taking advantage of us and us taking advantage of you, some of these collaborations. Stony Brook has had a joint genetics Ph.D. program with Cold Spring Harbor for many years. But that's just one narrow campus. How have you done it and what can we do to take more advantage of the fact that you're there and a world leader? Bruce Stillman: Thanks, Jack. Well, first of all, I think there are a number of things I want to say but the interactions with institutes like ours, with campuses like Stony Brook and others, is incredibly important. And it's actually becoming more and more important as the sciences become more integrated. The one thing about New York is that New York used to be - and I'm just basing this on NIH funding which I'm most familiar with - New York used to be the most dominant state in the country in terms of the percentage of federal dollars that came into the state. And New York is the only state that has been declining for the last 30 years. And it's still declining as a percentage of the total federal funding. And the reason for this is that this is in part because of the success of the initial work that was done in New York and the dissemination of that technology across the country and, in fact, around the world. And Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's been part of that dissemination of technology. So now every state in the country has large initiatives that are competing for NIH dollars. And interestingly, Massachusetts and California that you think are the ones that have benefited from the most from this actually have, percentage-wise, stayed exactly the same over the last 30 years in terms of the percentage of federal dollars. They've actually grown so they've maintained their percentage. New York has not, the percentage has gone down. But other states - Michigan, North Carolina, and lots of them, and Washington State - have grown enormously over the past 30 years. So we are in an incredibly competitive environment. And I think we should be using the resources we have in New York that are very, very substantial - it's not like they've disappeared - to bring the institutions together. And not just the SUNY campuses but I think SUNY should also be, in their strategic plan, looking to leverage the enormous resources that we have in private research institutions in the state, private universities, for instance, and also the National Laboratory of Brookhaven which is a rather unique resource to have compared to a lot of other states. The reality in getting federal funding, however, is that federal funding doesn't pay for 100% of research. And that is our experience. Just to give you an idea, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has 46 faculty, we have around about 450 scientists, and about 1,000 employees. And 25% of our research project comes from resources other than the federal government, mostly from philanthropy. And that 25% makes all of the difference between the reason why Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has such a high impact in its fields and the ability to get federal grants. Just as an example, in the $10 billion that went into the ARRA grants, the so-called stimulus money that went to NIH, of that $10 billion they allocated those in a number of different grant categories, including Grand Challenges and Grand Opportunity grants and things like that, we were 30% of the grants we put in. We only have 46 faculty, we put in 68 grants and a 30% success rate. And this was a phenomenal success rate. And I think the reason is that we have a lot of innovation. And we thought in those areas that we were successful, we had already invested considerable amounts of private money beforehand, before we even got those grants. So I think this comes down to when you're thinking about attracting federal research dollars, one needs to have a strategic plan, a leadership that understands the federal system, which I'll say more about in a minute. One has to participate in that federal system and also be willing to have the resources that can actually bring in, and in our experience the real innovation is really done with the private money we get and the federal monies really pay for the bulk of research and the expansion of that. And as was discussed in the earlier panel, industry is playing an increasing role and we are doing that at Cold Spring Harbor as well. And I think we have an extraordinarily good partnership with Pioneer Hi-Bred, a DuPont company in plant biology. And we've worked out ways to really break down this intellectual property barrier, which is a really major problem particularly in the medical sciences. One thing I want to pick up is that you need to also focus - one can't be best at everything - and focus within a single campus or within the SUNY system itself. So I'll talk about single campuses, and a single campus should focus research efforts on what they are good at and try to leverage that. Because if you try to become the best in the world, everybody else at that university will be perceived as being really good because you've got world-leading science in that institution. But also I think SUNY as a system has to think about focus. It's 64 campuses. I don't think one can expect that all 64 campuses are going to be the best in the world at everything. And so forming strategic initiatives between the campuses and, in fact, even investing in individual campuses I think is a way to attract additional federal funding. Obviously, flexibility in leadership is very important. And the leadership actually comes both ways. It's not just leadership at the institution but attracting federal funds. The way federal funds work... we all have this Utopian idea that our scientists can come up with ideas and apply for grants and those grants will get peer-reviewed by their peers in Washington and the best ones will get funded. Well, in fact, that very rarely happens. laughter When a bunch of scientists get together on a review panel, I think they dumb down science enormously. That didn't happen in the ARRA money because they didn't have time to put all these panels together. So individual scientists reviewed those grants and sent in their comments and those comments. And I think that was one of the reasons why innovation went so well in the stimulus money and doesn't work, despite efforts to try and get it to be working, in the NIH system. But in our experience, you have to be in Washington to influence where the money's going to go. The National Institutes of Health, all of the Institutes, don't decide by themselves where they're going to allocate these funds. So one has to be on committees to help them decide where that money is going to go. And if you want money to go in areas that you think you're good at, you need to be in Washington to try and influence that process. And I think that's a very, very important area that is not often kind of appreciated. But the institutions that do really well do that very well in my experience. And this is across the country. Just one other thing. The other thing is SUNY as a system has an enormous amount of potential influence in Washington. And it's also in Congress. And as Jack pointed out, where the money is going to go, and I mean, there's increasing competition for not just other places to get the money other than research, but dealing with the federal deficit, we're going to have to have a system of advocacy and SUNY has I think the capability of really trying to influence local New York politicians to be an advocate for science in Washington. And I think there's not been a lot of effort in New York on that front. We don't have a lot of science advocates among our politicians in New York. And I think that SUNY could play a major role on that as we move forth. John Marburger: I would agree with that. New York is an important state. I became conscious of that. Of course, we're all proud of our state. When I went to Washington, I wasn't sure what the attitude of the Bush Administration would be toward New York. It was not always complimentary. But in fact, New York is such an important state for our national economy that things that happen here are watched and taken seriously by the policymakers in Washington. And if SUNY were to have a larger profile in Washington, I think there could be many benefits. Not the least of which is attracting the attention of our own delegation so that if you see things happening in Washington and national affairs being influenced by SUNY, suddenly you realize that there's something in your own back yard that needs to be paid attention to. So I would agree with that. SUNY was not highly visible in my office. There are other systems, and particularly the Texas system, I think they knew when they had a good thing with their President in the White House. But I saw a lot more of them and some other states as well, and would come through routinely with their senior administration, talk about what their plans were. Let me just say a word about Brookhaven before we turn back to the panel. Brookhaven National Laboratory is actually owned by the Department of Energy. And talk about the fact that federal government, in fact, does not pay for the total cost of research I think is a very good point. In all our campuses, because of matching requirements and other requirements failure to recover the entire cost of the research under the Office of Management and Budget regulations, we all have to have a little kitty to invest in. At Brookhaven National Laboratory there is no big kitty. There is some royalty funds and the Department of Energy does allow the laboratory to have some flexible funds out of the money that they give to the laboratory. But everything at Brookhaven is funded under contracts with rather specific deliverables, except for a small percentage which is flexible. Nevertheless, Brookhaven Lab is mandated to cooperate with its region and to develop through its operating partners - it's currently Stony Brook University, Branson Research Foundation, and the Tell Memorial Institute - the laboratory is mandated to assist in regional and statewide economic development and to partner with institutions. Not only Stony Brook but also others. And there are programs at the laboratory which are available to other institutions. And for a long time those institutions which have research programs in areas that Brookhaven Lab excels in have been using the lab and the facilities at the laboratory. Wonderful facilities. And the new facilities that are being built now and operated are even more relevant to economic development and regional innovation than in the traditional history of the laboratory. So I'm sorry that Sam himself isn't here to talk about it because under his leadership and under his predecessors' since I was Lab Director, the laboratory has reached out much more effectively to the region and the communities and I know would welcome ideas that come out of this group and this planning effort to work together with SUNY. So with that I'd like to turn back. Joe? Did you spend time in Washington when you were working your initiatives at Hudson Valley? Joe Sarrubi: Yes, I did. John Marburger: What did you do? Joe Sarrubi: Basically, working with the Department of Energy representatives sharing our thoughts, our ideas. And it was interesting because they were also reaching out and how do they help us do what we want to do and help us do what we do best. Which I thought was interesting. So some of the people we were speaking to were looking for our ideas to get things off the ground to make sure that whatever federal grants that they were going to put out actually speaks and addresses the needs that we see. So and other agencies... John Marburger: Which agencies did you interact with mostly on those programs? Joe Sarrubi: In the Department of Energy mostly with renewable energies and energy- efficiency areas. That was our big focus. John Marburger: Great. By the way, those areas within the Department of Energy - energy efficiency, renewable energy - are not in the Office of Research, the Office of Science, which is the basic research area that supports Brookhaven Lab. So these are really new customers for us. And, frankly, Brookhaven National Laboratory would like to get more money from that part. And I believe that part of the Department of Energy is more likely to have a sustainable budget because of the concerns about renewable energy and sustainability than some of the other more esoteric parts. Joe Sarrubi: Yeah, they were very interested in our industry partnerships. For example, up at Hudson Valley our relationship with Global Foundries and several of the local institutions within a regional, a geographic area that have all kind of come together and formed an alliance to work with Global Foundries, I think has made a big difference. And General Electric, National Grid. It was interesting. When we talked with the Department of Energy, that streamline of potential job opportunities, again with the focus with community colleges, is a lot of it was about job training and supporting these industries. So as we went back and started speaking and collaborating more with the different industry partners, what was also interesting was an opportunity for their people with in-house training to be able to collaborate with us for different levels of certification or education to recognize the in-house training that they're doing as opposed to the actual credit or non-credit work that we're doing to support them. On a separate note, if they felt comfortable that we were going to work with them and recognize the training that they're doing in-house they were more willing to support our initiatives at the federal level for seeking funding. So we thought that was interesting as well. John Marburger: Fantastic. Fantastic. David, did you spend any time in Washington? David Lavallee: I haven't recently. The time I spent was mainly when I was at City College and we had a fair number of large-scale collaborative grants between the engineering school at City College and some of the science divisions. So I would go down with the deans and we would talk to the agency folks at that time. And it helped because it would align us with what they wanted to see as a response to their RFP. Which I think Joe has talked about. So we got a better idea of what it was they wanted to accomplish with that funding program than we were getting just from the written information. John Marburger: John O'Connor is here who is the president, I think, of the Research... are you the president of the Research Foundation? I get the titles mixed up. He's the boss of the SUNY Research Foundation, which I don't know if everybody here is aware of the structure of research in the SUNY system. But many public universities around the country have established not-for-profit separate corporations to handle the federal money and all of the reporting and compliance issues that come with it. And that's done for SUNY by the Research Foundation, a separate organization that has employees in many of the campuses. Certainly all the large research campuses. And one of the things that's interesting is that partnerships between the State University of New York and the Research Foundation, we have I think payoffs to taking more advantage of the Research Foundation to help with initiatives that would more properly be administered under the State University sort of academic administrative structure. Can you comment about that? Do you guys talk to each other and... David Lavallee: With Jim. Jim and I actually talk on at least a weekly basis. Sometimes more often. And that's really where the link comes in. Because Jim works with us on the academic side and then also works in the Research Foundation side. So we have a very close back-and-forth on those issues. John Marburger: Great. That's really important. And it works well on our campus as well. I think it's a good one. John, do you want to say a word about the role of the Research Foundation federal grants at this point? John O'Connor: Well, I think all of us are in Washington on a regular basis. We were just talking, the chancellor and I. I serve as vice-chancellor and secretary of the university and as President of the Research Foundation, a joint appointment. John Marburger we just appointed as an Operations Manager at the Research Foundation in addition to his service as Vice-President for Research at Stony Brook. So it's very closely interconnected on all of these pieces, where the Research Foundation provides the support services for all of these activities. And I think the aspect of it, Scott Tenenbaum just gave a presentation to the Research Foundation Board, which Myron Mitchell was listening to as ESF's representative. So we're all interconnected. And what you're hearing here today is how we all work together on that. The Research Foundation has come up with a strategic plan which is one step in supporting the overall SUNY strategic plan so that everything is interconnected. We've had a series of programs to train new faculty on how to go and secure grants. We have had programs, which I think some folks here may have attended, where we recognize faculty when they get their first patent. We hope that they get their first patent, they'll then get more patents. But it's very important to recognize faculty when they get their first patent. And oftentimes it's a great celebration when folks who get their first patent are with somebody else who've gotten their first patent because even though we have lots of processes that try to bring people together, it's the informal nature that brings people together. Then they realize, "You're working on that? I'm working on that, too." And they interconnect in that way, separate from all their department and campus processes. So it's just a whole series of activities. John Marburger: Yeah, it's very important. The Research Foundation's our partner in operating Brookhaven National Laboratory. It's our partner in operating our incubator facilities, which run like businesses. So it's really important for us to have that run right and for SUNY to be configured to take advantage of it. David Heath, would you like to add about your experiences with this? David Heath: Just a couple comments. For one, certainly for a smaller campus the Research Foundation is quite critical because they simply don't have the capacity to provide all of the services that we need to be significant in research. Whether it's dealing with grants management or whether it's simply dealing with intellectual property issues and development. One note that I would say that I find somewhat interesting is one of the challenges that I think we have as a system is that if you listened to the panel discussion that preceded this one and you listened to this conversation, our researchers fundamentally need to become not only good scientists but they need to be politicians and now they need to learn how to be businessmen and entrepreneurs as well. And I would see that as certainly something that they're not trained for. It's something they may not be aware of from a cultural standpoint in terms of being important. But something that is clearly critical in terms of navigating the future of the scientific granting process. John Marburger: Any comments on things that SUNY can do to help instill this culture of innovation awareness in our faculty? David Heath: Well, I will just quickly. You may think that certainly for a lot of the interinstitutional initiatives, certainly some of the types of things that John spoke about is very helpful. Getting industry to be directly involved in communicating with groups of our researchers as they come together and again - actually before this panel we were simply discussing something like the SUNY Eye Institute or other initiatives - that's a great opportunity to begin to train individuals to see the potential of their research in their collaborative efforts. And most of those individuals are basic scientists who are really passionate about their work, passionate about their laboratories but may not have really been thinking about how to take it beyond that point. So certainly I think there's got to be cross-campus systemwide resources invested to heighten the awareness and the potential for bringing these things ---_____. John Marburger: Great. We've come to the end of our schedule time but I think we can have a... John Marburger: Yeah, yeah. After Bruce I'm going to ask for at least one or two questions from the audience. I think we can afford to do that. So Bruce, you're on. Bruce Stillman: I want to just kind of comment on this last point that one of the things that I think doesn't happen in New York because of New York's prominence in the nation and actually in the world, we have a lot of, IBM not withstanding, we have a lot of large industries that are headquartered in New York that don't focus on New York. Pfizer being one of them. We have a lot of very large venture-capital companies in New York that don't focus on New York. And if you look at the success across the country at other places, and this ability of faculty to interact, if entrepreneurs are hanging around labs all the time and venture-capital people are hanging around labs all the time, that's going to generate an environment. And one of the things that struck me is that the places that are successful in technology transfer have venture-capital that care about their local community. They don't want to be venture-capitalists that are flying across the world to go to Board meetings when they can drive 10 miles to go to a Board meeting. And Silicon Valley is like that, Boston is like that, San Diego is like that, and Seattle is like that. And I know a lot of these people who are very focused on their home turf. Now it's not that they only invest in that but you look at the things that come out of Stanford and they're all funded by local venture-capital. And I think that's another cultural thing that we need to probably address in New York. John Marburger: Excellent. Excellent. Some comments, questions from the audience. Bob Genco: I'm Bob Genco. I'm the Tech Transfer Officer at the University of Buffalo. Relevant to that point about venture-capital and also to your point about research in New York State, Judy Albers has a very nice study, actually two white papers, on this issue. And her findings are that, at least recently, New York State is #2 in federal funding including Brookhaven, it's about $4.5 million. About $2 million upstate and $2.5 million downstate. But #27 in terms of venture-capital. Of the nation's venture-capital, about 4% is in New York State. So we're #2 in our R&D and #27 in venture-capital. So to your point, that something needs to be done about that tremendous discrepancy. John Marburger: Actually, that's a very interesting phenomenon. I used to get calls from venture- capitalists in New York City saying, "Don't you have anything out at Stony Brook that we can do? I'm tired of flying to California." So there are other aspects and dimensions to this problem. It isn't so much that the New York State venture- capitalists like to go to California and Boston, Massachusetts and so forth, as that there are other factors that are somehow inhibiting it. I think we have to identify those factors systematically. Part of it is business environment, environmental issues associated with some of the types of industry, and just simply the ease or lack thereof of doing business in... it is different in different states. But I do think that SUNY can help the state economic development people to understand how they can target industries, which ones are likely to be most successful, and focus all of our attentions on paths forward through the intricacies of doing business in New York State. Carl Hayden: Jack, just a comment. And part of that has to do with the fact that, historically, we have taken the easy way of simply licensing our intellectual capital rather than going through the hard work of commercializing them. John Marburger: That's interesting. That's an important point. In the back, standing. Drew Matonak: Drew Matonak, President of Hudson Valley Community College. A couple things just in reaction to what we heard from all of the speakers, and a couple comments. The theme here is leveraging. Leveraging all of our resources. And the one great strength that SUNY has is that we've got institutions. We've got our research institutions, we have our state-ops, and we have the 30 community colleges that are there to serve our individual communities. One thing that Joe said was about the Department of Energy and why they were attracted to Hudson Valley. A lot of that was leveraging not only the resources of the colleges that have come together to partner on this grant but also looking at what Hudson Valley has done with leveraging our relationship with NYSERDA and the state. And as you were talking about the different agencies, I do know through my conversations with NSF, Department of Energy, Department of Labor, they are leveraging the resources of each other. Over the last couple of years they've had a number of meetings so that they can utilize their strengths to be able to address this 21st century workforce. And a lot of the things that are coming out are as a result of those conversations. So my question for the panel is, you know, we have this great resource of SUNY and if we were to take the strengths of our research institutions and our state- ops and our community colleges, working with the state in our local communities, do you believe that we can put ourselves in the tremendously competitive situation with regard to attracting these federal dollars from a number of those agencies. John Marburger: That's a very important point. You know, partnering with the state turns out to be one of SUNY's most important sources of funding. We can talk a lot about the problems that we're having with state funding for the state purposes, budgets of the campuses. But when you look at how the externally-sponsored research breaks down between federal and state support, the state support - not through SUNY directly but through the agencies and authorities that fund projects like this building - it's comparable. The state is putting in dollars comparable, of the same order of magnitude as the federal agencies are if you add up all of the sources. So I think that's an extremely important point, that I certainly had overlooked until quite recently. And that kind of partnership from the states is impressive to the federal agencies as well. I know the Department of Energy was impressed when the State of New York ponied up for some facilities at Brookhaven National Laboratories. A historical first. And we could go to the federal government and say, "Look. The State of New York has been willing to do this. Will you help?" So that leverage is extremely important and we should be conscious of the fact... and, you know, we ought to be telling our own legislators about how the rest of the state agencies are supporting SUNY and CUNY and maybe they should support SUNY academic missions as well, which provides the core support that makes all this possible. This has been an extremely stimulating and provocative discussion. I'd like to thank our panelists once again for coming out and helping us with these insights. applause Sam Stanley: So I'm about to free you to go get your lunch. I promise. But I just wanted to say a couple things. So first of all, for the next segment of this, within your folders you have questions for working group discussions. And there's five questions there. I think the most important one is probably #5 but the four above are supposed to help you get to #5. But that's the one I think we care the most about. And the way this process should work is, at most of your tables there should be one of the panelists who was part of the discussion should be there to help lead your discussion at your table. If you find yourself at a table without a panelist, then you might want to appoint a leader amongst yourself. I'm not going to go to each table and figure out who that should be so I'll let you do that on your own. But then you should also appoint someone to be your scribe, to essentially take notes during the discussion. So that person should help record what it is that you talk about and the major points. And then one person who would be a reporter. And so what we're going to do is we're going to call upon tables to come up and report their output up front here. So you'll be responsible for coming up and reporting, everybody, kind of in a very brief form because we don't want more than about five minutes for each of those reports. And to talk about what was talked about at your table, and then your answers to those questions. And again, I'm going to focus primarily on the answer to question #5 when we bring you up. So you will actually have to do some work. And then at the end of this, and I'll emphasize this again, we're going to collect the written output from each of the tables and we'll use that as we start to formulate the results from this event. It's being recorded so we'll have the actual discussions but we'll also use the output from you individuals as well. So make sure you find those things when you come back from getting your lunch and get started, because we're on a pretty tight time frame. So at this point, I'm going to free you to go out and get your lunch. Please come back and reassemble and then start your work immediately answering these questions. And thank you. Sam Stanley: So I think we're going to restart again. So this is the time when I call on some tables and ask your reporter to come up and talk a little bit about what you've just been doing. And what I'll ask is for each of the reporters to identify themselves and say who they are, and then maybe give a very brief synopsis of the discussion. There's five questions. I don't think we have time to go through all five in detail, so perhaps a brief synopsis of high points that came in the discussion. But then I do want to hear #5, your answer to #5 and what were the three ideas you came up with. So I'm going to start with table #7. So if I could have somebody from table #7 come up. Sam Stanley: You actually have to come up to the podium, yes. It gets worse so, yeah. Theresa Pardo: Good afternoon. My name is Theresa Pardo. I'm at the University at Albany. I'm the Director of the Center for Technology in Government. I'm also an associate professor in Public Administration and Policy, and on the faculty of the College of Computing and Information. Our group had a very energetic conversation. We started out with looking at the five questions and then we decided to jump to the final question and focus there. Our early conversations were about basically an agreement on the need for more collaboration, a concern about investments being made or the call for research to be in more targeted areas. And so we talked a bit about that. And a little bit about the federal priorities for research and how they're rapidly shifting and how one of the challenges that we all face is keeping up with the shifts in those priorities. As we moved to our conversation about goals, we were able to come up with three and we had a lot of conversation about those three. The first one is essentially talking about an alignment of the value systems within the changing environment. A lot of conversation came out of the panels this morning about that. A lot of energy for this idea in the group. And essentially looking at our value systems and becoming clear among ourselves as a community about how we need to think about evaluation, how we talk about what we're good at and what we value. So essentially changing the discourse on our campuses and creating new kinds of evaluations, policies, and procedures to support, essentially to allow us to walk the talk that we value more than what we have traditionally valued. And not, most importantly, that we value those things less but that in fact we have new things that we value as well. The second goal was to act like a system. There was a lot of energy at the table for the idea that if we operated in a more collaborative way across the system that we might be able to do things - and I'm going to switch notes here - where we could leverage all of the SUNY resources including research, training, treatment, and outreach to attack complex public problems such as heart disease. So essentially what we talked about in the group was thinking, for example, about how SUNY might respond to President Obama's Request for Information about how we might address societal challenges. There's an RFI on the streets from The White House that says, "Tell me how you think we should deal with these societal issues." And wouldn't it be great if SUNY had a response to that RFI. The third one is in terms of the relationship between research and the economy. And essentially we talked for the longest about this one and really did a lot of thinking about the words, and thought about how we would like to become the world leader and having research drive the economy. We talked about the tension between the economy driving our research and what we thought about that and how we felt about it. But I think that there's an interest in the balance that we can strike between research and how we value research and our connection to the economy, both in the State of New York and beyond. applause Sam Stanley: Table 4. Steve Scheinman: I'm Steve Scheinman. I'm the Dean of the College of Medicine at Upstate Medical University. And we had a fabulous discussion at our table. It was lively. It was particularly lively because of the time pressure. There was much more that we wanted to share than we had time to do. We chose a reporter who claims to have the best handwriting at the table and it turned out not to be true. everyone laughs But I will do my best. First, we attempted to go through the questions in sequence and my responses will not be in sequence. We acknowledged the fact that SUNY is a huge university and that that sometimes seems to be an obstacle to getting things done. But in fact it represents a huge opportunity, particularly for collaboration and for benefiting from the critical mass that can be brought together. And we often feel like the poor stepchild compared to the private universities in New York which we sometimes feel, both in the public mind and in Albany, get more respect than we do. But there is something that SUNY can do that I know that the privates can't do, which is to collaborate across campuses. And the SUNY REACH is something we talked about a lot. It has already become an excellent example. Vision is the best component of it, the component of it that's moved farthest along. But David described the other parts of it as well. And what we discussed is how the concept of SUNY REACH is not one that necessarily is limited just to biomedicine. And in fact, something like SUNY REACH can occur across the other areas of strength within SUNY such as the Centers of Excellence, such as other areas of current strengths. And so our first big hairy audacious goal was to identify these areas and to expand them without adding new areas. But to expand them by increasing critical mass and maximizing collaboration across campuses. Our second hairy audacious goal was to integrate these various areas of interest that have grown up through SUNY and to integrate them together in a synergistic way that becomes multidisciplinary. One example that came up at the table is criminal justice research that's taking place in Albany in which sociologists are collaborating with medical campuses, both within and without SUNY. And so we came up with two hairy audacious goals. But there were some other considerations that we thought should be on the radar screen. One is, since the amount of research that's done is very much a function of the number of active investigators that we should have - and I guess this amounts to a third hairy audacious goal - we should increase the research faculty within SUNY over the next 10 years by 50%. And in order to do that we need to find new ways to fund the faculty and better ways to manage the workforce. Another thing that we felt, that until now Albany has not done very well for SUNY, and SUNY may not have done as well within SUNY as it could, is to allocate resources in a strategic way. Driven by strategic decision-making rather than by formula. While this may seem to be advocating for maximizing research resources for those campuses that are doing the most research, and in a sense it is, at the same time other campuses can clearly benefit. We heard many examples today of community colleges and the other state-ops participating and benefiting from the research that's occurring at the research- intensive universities. We had a number of smaller ideas but since other people have hairy goals that we need to leave time for, I'll stop there. applause Sam Stanley: So table #10. Joyce Brown: The worst part of this is that you're going to see what is the state of my notes. Oh, dear. We had a lot to say and so and I think we're getting a theme here. I think a number of similar kinds of things evolved. We started really with talking about what we thought of as the strengths of SUNY. And we said, "What are we good at? What is it that we ought to build from?" And that is that we have a very strong undergraduate and graduate program. That we should build on the fact that we have an integrated system of both two-year programs, four-year programs and thus the great potential for feeding a very strong graduate program. And the comment was made that this is also very attractive to funding sources, both public and private. Where they understand that we can seed the ground and really produce individuals who share those common research interests. When we talked about what the research environment ought to look like 10 years from now, there was pretty much a common thought that the desire will be there to fulfill the needs of interdisciplinary kinds of research and collaboration. There'll be a need for more practicality and applicability of the kind of research that's being done which would include more computing and numerical simulation. But that we need to understand that we need to build on the strength of SUNY which is the ability to draw on that strong integrated system. We need to eliminate the tendency to avoid collaboration and have all these pockets of activity that are going on instead of really building on what we have. There were a number of notions of programs that currently exist that ought to enable us to do this better. Computerized kinds of programs where faculty and students, if we have the will to build the system, would have the opportunity to identify what kinds of research activities are taking place on different campuses so that you would be able to sort of build that hub of activity even if it's cross- campus and interdisciplinary from the point of where the researchers are actually located. That faculty may collaborate together, that students who have an interest in an area might even work in the research on another campus. We talked a lot about how do you make that happen. How do we move from what the culture is, which is not just SUNY but I think the tendency for people doing research in the laboratory, to not really reach out beyond and collaborate with partners or find those partners with whom to collaborate. And it goes from the top. Whether it's on a campus with a department chair who rewards those kinds of activities, whether it comes from a president, whether or not we all sort of buy into this movement of making SUNY operate more as a system with the leadership that the chancellor is demonstrating in trying to get us to think that way. It really is going to come from the top and our willingness to make these things happen and get us to that way of functioning 10 years from now. Our big hairy audacious goals mostly were focused on green energy solutions and sustainability. The ways in which we might have an impact on addressing the challenges on environmental issues, climate modeling, and those sorts of things. And of course the other item that we talked a bit about was the potential for biomedical research and really kind of organizing some sort of database for clinical trials so that it's not so much all over the lot but a place for people to be able to work together and collaborate. I would say that the notion of the ability to collaborate and not have all these disparate pockets of activity going on really did permeate a great deal of the discussion. applause Sam Stanley: Thank you so much. So I want to give some time, there's tables that actually do want to report. And so if there's any table that actually would like to share? Because I've done three but if there's a table that really has a great idea and wants to share then, please, come forward and do so. Paul Agris: Well, I'm up here so we must have a great idea, guys, right? I am Paul Agris and since I'm only employed a very small amount by the SUNY system, does that mean that my time is cut short? Sam Stanley: Yes. Paul Agris: Oh, okay. everyone laughs All right, then I could say that we agree with everything up there... everyone laughs ...to begin with. We talked about de-emphasizing the degree programs that presently exist and creating cross-disciplinary degree programs which include entrepreneurship that Don Siegel talked about earlier in all areas of strength in the SUNY system which include biomedical, SUNY Research REACH program in particular, computer science, engineering, nanotechnology, and a program that I was not aware of that was brought up at our table, marine and Great Lakes research programs. We also talked about the importance of highly-collaborative research and providing incentives that go beyond the SUNY system and beyond the State of New York and globally. So global health problems, for instance, is a good example. In my own program with U-Albany, we're reaching out to the Wadsworth Center, to Rensellaer, and to Rochester for the new institute at the University of Albany. We believe that SUNY has to look inside for readjusting resources and funding to subsidize start-ups and do it in a realistic manner because the payback is not going to come for some time for start-ups. And to encourage faculty and students to be entrepreneurs. And one needs to teach a business acumen to students as well as to faculty and to provide them with incentives that they will be engaged in this type of research and corporate mindset. So we talked about changing the mindset at SUNY and we came up with an idea. Our global idea which we're calling SUNY INC, I-N-C, for Incentives for New Companies. SUNY Incentives for New Companies. Which is a very broad idea. It starts with students and faculty and identifying strengths and all the things that have been said about collaboration across lines, across campuses, outside of the system in New York to private universities and corporations, and across the globe. applause Sam Stanley: So, thank you to all the tables and Kaitlin will be coming around and maybe, Carol, you can help to collect everybody's written account of what happened at your tables and your answers to these questions. So we have scheduled time for about a five-minute very quick wrap-up. Jack, could you join me up here? I don't know if you knew you were supposed to do this but you are. To join me for the last five minutes. And Bob Catell was supposed to come up as well but I don't see Bob in the audience. He had to leave? Okay. So Dr. Meyerson, would you mind filling in? Bernard Meyerson: Yep. Sam Stanley: Thanks. So the idea I think is just for each of us to give a brief summary of what you heard and any thoughts you have. Bob Catell: I'd like to be very brief. I kept hearing how SUNY needed to act more like a system in enabling every one of these big goals. SUNY has a reputation today. SUNY has a national reputation in the higher education and political communities, and it's a reputation of being a huge, ungovernable, chaotic system... everyone laughs ...that is a collection of campuses, many of which are outstanding but whose assets have not been empowered and brought together to have the impact that they can. And that's not unusual because many, many, if not all, state systems with multiple campuses have similar problems. And if SUNY can make any progress on capturing these enormous potential assets of multiple campuses with talented faculty and very large numbers of students in every area of the state, if SUNY can show how that can be done it will make a big impact. It will provide national leadership. Because other states are looking to find ways of bringing together the resources that they've invested to improve the quality of life and their economic competitiveness in their own states. This strategic plan process holds out the opportunity to make a big step forward that, in itself, has a great deal of power. And that is to find ways and create ways to use its vast capacity. So I think there's been a consciousness raising associated with this process that is necessary - almost a culture change - among my colleagues and the people that I've heard at these various meetings. There is a consciousness of the need to pull together and make us a real system out of this. I've been associated with SUNY since 1980 and I've never seen as much consensus for the need to do this as I do today. So the big hairy audacious goal in fact, from my perspective, is to make SUNY work as a system. It's easy to say but it's very, very difficult to do. And it's going to require deliberate attention by individuals to the infrastructure that we need in terms of our business systems, and our curricula, and our facilities and how we manage them. So I'm very excited by the planning process. I think any strides that we make here will achieve the goals that we talked about of increasing federal support and partnerships with industry. So thanks for letting me be a part of this. applause Bernard Myerson: This is one of those cases where you get to hear my unprepared remarks. I'm never prepared. This is a very tough time. As you know, economically there's enormous pressures on. But it's also a time of enormous opportunities. We have a tendency to emphasize how things get done. It's a natural tendency. I've been in executive management for 15 years but every once in a while I put my hand on the door and slam it to remind myself there are more painful things out there such as "What are you going to do?" And it's a really good idea to strike the right balance between those two. If you enable at the expense of actually not putting the energy into what you want to enable, you get in trouble. If you only focus on what you want to enable but you don't enable it, you get nothing done. There is a middle ground and the real opportunity, as I see it, is focusing on what it is you want to do and then how it is you're going to get it done. Part of this process here is we face huge and seminal challenges out there. And the good news is you have huge resources to apply to them. The trick is to figure out what those challenges you want to focus on are - and the key word there is focus. If you continue to have large, highly disparate but disconnected efforts, and there are many of those out there, you will not make the progress necessary to be essentially a compelling entity not just a good one. And this is really the challenge. Whether you decide that the fact that, you know, my favorite example is in the year about 2045 at present rates, the only thing that uses electrical energy in the world will be information technology. Consumption is growing at a rate that by that day you won't be able to turn on the lights or run your heat but you will be able to run your server, which will warm your feet but that's about it. everyone laughs There are things coming. These are the discontinuities you need to identify and get a focus on. Though I commend the fact that there's been a lot of talk about how to get that done, it's absolutely imperative to focus on what you want to get done and really build those excellence, not just Centers of Excellence in word but actually in focus. And it's a very tough thing. It requires a degree of selectivity that we really are not very comfortable doing. I know, because I've been in academics. And it's very hard to say, "This has merit. This looks backwards so we're not going to continue it." But it's going to come to that at some point. And sooner than later is healthy. I commend the fact that there are teams working, I know they are working on areas such as energy and these are great things. But at some point you've got to cut and run. And that's when it's going to be hard. And that's where everybody in this room's going to have to nod their head and say, "Yea, verily." It's leadership. I mean, what you're going to need ultimately is the hardcore leadership to enable you to make the hard choices and move on. And I heard some of it today and I was really delighted by it. You know, I'm a product of the City University system, CCNY, and it was important to me then and it's important to us now. Thank you. Sam Stanley: I think this has been, for me at least, an extraordinarily productive day. It's been I think a unique opportunity to bring together this disparate group of campuses as well as people who really are concerned about our future and the future of New York together in one place to talk about what should we be doing in terms of research and innovation. And I'm not going to repeat the wisdom that we just heard from Jack and from Dr. Meyerson. I think they spoke very clearly I think about two things that I think came out for me from this. One is the need that everybody agree to to leverage the tremendous resources of SUNY but, two, they need to focus those in particular areas if we're going to really have the impact of our size. I mean, that's putting it kind of in simple terms but that's how I see it. That's challenging but I think it can't be done unless we have these kinds of discussions. And I think for the Strategic Plan we will have to think very carefully about what are the mechanisms now by which we implement that. What kind of portals do we set up that allow us to establish greater communications. We've heard about fantastic results from grassroots efforts, where people have actually gone out and basically - the Fuller brush story was fantastic - but basically have gone forward to really push and make those kinds of connections. Are there things that we can do to make that easier for our faculty and for our leaders. Are there ways in which we can improve communication, ways in which we can develop and identify these kinds of programs better. How do we take the energy of our faculty at the grassroots level and then identify, use them to help us identify, where those areas of discontinuity are going to be in the future. What are those areas going to be where we want to focus? How do we use the wisdom of our faculty in a way to allow us to do that. So we can make the investment. I mean, the nanotechnology is a great story. It's also a story about investment. I mean, a tremendous investment was made by the state to make that happen and in others as well. So this does require investment but we have to really figure out how are the ways in which we can identify those new areas, invest, and then leverage all the resources of the system together to do that. So I'm looking forward to reading the other products of this. I may be in touch with some of you as we try and assemble and put together the report from this to present to the Steering Committee for SUNY Strategic Planning. I'm on that committee so I can help obviously communicate what went on today. But we'll be using all of your written contributions. And I would say now, if there's other things you want to communicate that you think didn't come out today, e-mail me and I'll do my best to get them incorporated in this. So thank you all very much. We have almost a perfect dismissal time. Chancellor Zimpher has said always she really likes early dismissal. I didn't quite live up to that but we're right at 2:00. Thank you so much. 107