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BY DAVE BEAL, St. Paul Pioneer Press
For decades, critics have argued that the University of Minnesota
perpetuated a risk-averse culture that kept it from reaping the
benefits of its own researchers' many innovations. And businesses
have complained that the University is like a black box —
so caught up in its own intricate web of relationships that outsiders
can't find their way in.
Tim Mulcahy is determined to change those impressions.
He won the University's top research job early last year, after
holding the No. 2 research post at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Now he's a man with a mandate: tighten the ties between the University
of Minnesota and the state's business community.
At a time when the university is fighting for a shrinking share
of the state budget, and when businesses need the intellectual horsepower
of the university more than ever, most people agree that business
and academia need to find a way to work together.
That's easier said than done, but U-watchers say Mulcahy is already
delivering.
A New Attitude
At the heart of the change is a new attitude at the university toward
"tech transfer" — the process of commercializing
and cashing in on the ideas of its scientists and technicians.
Last month, the university announced it had taken a 57 percent stake
in Macular Regeneration, a promising startup that has developed
a potential therapy to treat an eye disease that affects millions
of Americans. Three U researchers came up with the therapy, and
the university has recruited former Atritech CEO Tom Borillo to
turn their idea into a company. In the past, the U took only small
stakes in such enterprises.
Mulcahy has established six staff positions designed to help businesses
strengthen research ties with the U. He has also launched two small
grant programs to help U researchers get companies going.
The Office of Business Development, a unit under Mulcahy headed
by former venture capitalist Doug Johnson, has set forth an ambitious
goal: to launch three to five startups a year that have the potential
to become large companies.
Mulcahy hasn't worked alone. He has consulted regularly with a business-oriented
group he calls his "dream team" — venture capitalist
Gary Smaby; Johnson; former broadcast executive Steve Goldstein,
a top executive at the university's foundation; and U administrator
and one-time pharmaceutical executive Chuck Muscoplat.A swarm of
other influential players from the Twin Cities venture and investment
fields have stepped forward to advise Mulcahy's staffers.
Perhaps most important, the university is trying to bring more flexibility
to the ways it measures risk. Mulcahy says the U tended to look
at all its tech-transfer risks pretty much the same way. He wants
to weigh the risks more in relation to their potential rewards,
the way a business would.
The improving ties between business and the U go far beyond Mulcahy.
Before he arrived, the Itasca Group, a group of Twin Cities corporate
leaders, was working with the university to strengthen these bonds.
U President Bob Bruininks, his top aides and the school's Board
of Regents have been pushing to focus more on the university's strongest
suits. Last year, they gave Mul-cahy's office a big boost when they
set a goal to become one of the world's top three public research
universities within a decade.
With nearly 3,000 tenured faculty members and 18,000 graduate and
professional students, research is big business at the U, and Mulcahy's
150 staffers oversee all aspects of it. Public and private sponsors
grant nearly $600 million a year to the U for research projects.
"We are positioned perfectly," Mulcahy says. "It's
all here. We've got all the assets … but we need to bring
them together."
Part of Mulcahy's job is overseeing compliance with the laws and
rules that govern research at the U. The university has made much
progress in that area since the 1990s, when Surgery Department chairman
John Najarian was forced to resign amid controversy over the sale
of the ALG transplant drug developed at the school. The U's new
policies, designed to minimize conflicts that could blemish its
research, have been hailed nationally.
Within the institution, though, the controversy dampened researchers'
willingness to commercialize their research.
The Madison Model
But the culture is changing. "We have created a far more disciplined,
far more focused and far more business-oriented model" to support
researchers who want to take their innovations to the marketplace,
says Mulcahy.
That's the kind of model Mulcahy worked with at UW-Madison. There,
the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) has driven the tech-transfer
process ever since its first grant to the school in 1928. WARF's
first big winner was the licensing and commercialization of a Vitamin
D discovery, by University of Wisconsin professor Harry Steenbock,
which eventually eliminated the disease of rickets.
Since then, WARF-supported research has generated $800 million for
the school. The money has supported more than 50,000 research projects,
sponsored thousands of graduate fellowships and scores of named
professorships, helped to retain faculty members and paid for at
least part of nearly every research facility on the Madison campus.
Another distinguishing feature, University Research Park,located
three miles west of campus, houses 110 businesses employing more
than 5,300 people.
Such assets led Inc. magazine to name UW-Madison as one of the nation's
five most business-friendly campuses early this year.
But there are no plans to make the U a clone of Madison. "We
can learn from some of what they (UW-Madison) have done, recognizing
that you can't just directly translate their model," Mulcahy
said. "The environment here is, I think, a bit more conservative."
It would take decades to grow a WARF here, for one thing, and the
U has just begun working toward a research park, after years of
indifference to the idea. Mulcahy strongly supports a research park
here, along the transit way linking its Minneapolis and St. Paul
campuses, but it's many years from reality.
That said, U officials plainly are counting on Mulcahy's familiarity
with UW-Madison's strategies to help jump-start tech-transfer efforts
here.
An Appetite for Complexity
Mulcahy moved into research administration 10 years ago, after a
prolific career as a researcher. His specialty was learning how
cancer cells become resistant to chemotherapy and finding ways to
overcome the resistance.
Not all researchers make good administrators, but Martin Cadwallader,
dean of the graduate school and vice chancellor for research at
UW-Madison, says Mulcahy is a good listener who works well with
others. That put him on a trajectory for a top research job, said
Cadwallader, who edged out Mulcahy for that post at Madison.
Tim and his wife, Patti, were high school sweethearts. At Madison,
she headed human resources for the university's medical school.
Now she has a similar job at the U's med school.
In his spare time, Tim Mul-cahy is an avid reader who just polished
off a 2,619-page novel, "The Baroque Cycle" by Neal Stephenson,
a complicated trilogy set in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
Now Mulcahy is plowing through another Stephenson novel called "Cryptonomicon."
This one is 918 pages.
He says following the complex plots laid out in Stephenson's novels
pales beside the challenge of navigating a big public research university.
And he notes that the increasing push to cash in on university research
"is not universally embraced" at either UW-Madison or
the University of Minnesota.
An article in America magazine this summer titled "The Corporate
University" gave voice to concerns about campus-corporate ties.
But John Adams, a geography professor at the U since 1970 who has
served on many faculty committees, counters that the tighter ties
here are the inevitable and probably overdue result of sustained
pressures on all large public universities across the country.
Adams says that while the U faces much competition for professors,
students and resources from other universities, legislators have
cut deeply into the school's share of the state budget.
Still, many Minnesotans continue to expect the school to maintain
its smorgasbord of departments, courses, centers and other services.
Given such pressures, Adams argues that the U has no choice but
to seek more support from business.
"What Tim's doing flows directly from what Bob Bruininks is
trying to do," he says.
Mulcahy sees his work as part of a larger imperative. "If the
U.S. is to remain competitive, universities and corporations need
to work very well together. It's got to happen."
Dave Beal can be reached at dbeal@pioneerpress.com. Editor's note:
Dave Beal retired in June after 25 years at the Pioneer Press, but
he hasn't disappeared from our pages. His column will continue to
appear on an occasional basis. Welcome, back, Dave.
This article originally appeared in the Sun, Aug. 27, 2006
edition of the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
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