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Mark Crowell's morning commute turned a lot shorter Sept. 5, his first day on
the job as an associate vice chancellor and director of the Office of
Technology Development at the University.
The Carolina graduate had plowed through interstate traffic from his home in
Chapel Hill to get to N.C. State University in Raleigh. Now Crowell could walk
to work from his house on North Boundary Street to his office in Bynum Hall
here on campus. It takes him just three minutes to drive.
"I knew we had I-40 on my side," said Linda Dykstra, Carolina's interim vice
provost for graduate studies and research who led the search committee that
recommended Crowell. He replaced Francis Meyer, who left Carolina to join a
Durham venture capital/consulting firm.
Crowell's commute may be shorter, but his responsibilities remain just as
great.
He had been at N.C. State eight years. He started as the assistant vice
chancellor and director of technology administration and development. Since
August 1996 he had been the associate vice chancellor for technology transfer
and industry research.
"We had a tremendous amount of respect for what he has been doing at State and
we are very pleased to have him here," Dykstra said. "Sometimes, there is the
right position for the right person at the right time. Here, Mark will be able
to take his skills at building a technology development office and apply them
in a context with new challenges."
Crowell said he views his new job at Carolina as an exciting opportunity. But
in another sense, it feels like coming back home.
He earned a bachelor's degree in international studies at the University in
1976 and a master's of regional planning here three years later. His wife
Marjorie is an assistant vice chancellor in the advancement office. The couple
lives in an old house a few blocks off Franklin Street that they have been
renovating over the past few years.
Crowell said it was a struggle to decide whether to leave what he considered to
be the "dream job" he already had.
"How could you leave all that?" his friends and colleagues asked him as he
debated whether to stay.
The short answer, Crowell told himself, was the opportunity to build the same
kind of program at Carolina, which is exactly the charge that he has been
given, Dykstra said.
After Dykstra offered him the job, Crowell said he asked for a telephone
interview with James Moeser, Carolina's new chancellor, to make sure Moeser's
expectations matched his own. They did.
"He was just wonderfully gracious and available and articulate and exciting and
high energy when he expressed his thoughts and goals about technology
transfer," Crowell said. "He just didn't say, `Come on Mark, come home to
Chapel Hill.' What he said was, "We are really committed to this, this is what
engaged universities need to do well.'"
Crowell said Moeser's insistence that technology transfer would be an
"institutional priority" was what he needed to hear before he was willing to
give up a job he was already more than happy with at N.C. State.
"I just think there is a commitment to go to the next level, and the thought of
doing it on home turf makes it all the more enticing," Crowell said.
The two things that make N.C State's program stand out are Centennial Campus
and a venture capital fund for start-ups that the university established two
years ago, Dykstra said.
The research components at N.C. State revolve around engineering and
agriculture. One key research component at Carolina that will be different is
the Health Affairs research, Dykstra said.
"The audience is different, but the practices will be easily translated,"
Dykstra said. "We can take advantage of all of the inventions and the products
of our research that are coming from our Health Affairs campus and try to
commercialize those that have potential."
The value of technology transfer
It's hard to get people to understand exactly what technology transfer
is and harder still to get them to grasp its full significance.
Crowell remembers a conversation years ago with his now 85-year-old
mother-in-law from New Orleans. She made it clear to him she was not impressed
when he told her he worked in technology transfer.
"`I don't know why you spent all that time and money to go to college just to
move computers around,'" Crowell remembers her telling him.
Simply defined, technology transfer is taking university-developed technology
with practical applications to the private sector so that the technology can
lead to new products, services and jobs.
The three research universities in the Triangle -- Carolina, N.C. State and
Duke -- have often been described together as the engine of the state and
regional economy.
If the universities are the engines of the economy, then technology transfer
could be described as the supercharger that has boosted the creation of new
companies and jobs to a higher level.
During the eight years Crowell led N.C. State's technology transfer and
industry research program, its licensing income increased from $1.5 million in
1992 to almost $7.8 million by 1999. From 1996 to 1999, N.C. State's equity
holdings increased from two companies to more than a dozen.
N.C. State's technology transfer program was ranked third in the nation this
year in a study carried out by the Southern Growth Policies Board's Southern
Technology Council. The Carolina technology transfer program ranked among the
nation's top 16 in the same study. The top 16 were selected from a list of 164
research universities.
In fiscal year 1999, research funding at Carolina totaled $344.5 million, a
$39.5 million increase from the previous year. The University issued 41 new
U.S. patents in 1999 as well, bringing to 261 the total of U.S. and foreign
patents it has issued.
Carolina inventions and know-how now in the marketplace have helped spawn 21
new companies that employ more than 12,500 people, and the campus's license
income in 1999 totaled $1.7 million.
Crowell said the most noticeable feature that makes N.C. State's program stand
out is the Centennial Campus.
It sits on 1,192 acres and has 900 corporate and government employees; 900 N.C.
State faculty members, post-doctoral students and staff; and 1,400 N.C. State
students. By 2002, the campus is expected to have three times as many corporate
and government employees, 400 housing residents and 600 middle school students
along with hundreds more faculty and students.
So far, $340 million has been invested in the campus. It now consists of 15
major buildings with a total of 1.3 million square feet of space. Thirteen
additional buildings are expected to open by the end of 2001. A privately
developed executive conference center, hotel and golf course are set to open in
2002.
When fully developed, the Centennial Campus is expected to hold 12,500
corporate and government employees; 12,500 N.C. State faculty, staff and
students; 2,400 support services personnel; and the 600 middle school
students.
Crowell said the opportunity to be involved with the development of the Horace
Williams tract at Carolina was one of the things that excited him about taking
the job here. The 979-acre tract is off Airport Road one-and-a-half miles
northwest of the main campus.
Jump starting the start-ups
The other thing Crowell is excited about is establishing a venture
capital fund for Carolina that will be similar to the $10 million Centennial
Venture Partners (CVP) Fund that N.C. State, in a joint venture with the N.C.
Technological Development Authority, established in September 1998.
Every $1 of seed money offered through the fund has attracted $6 from other
investors, Crowell said.
In less than two years, the CVP fund has invested in 15 companies affiliated
with N.C. State, including many located on the Centennial Campus. These
companies have created more than 200 jobs, Crowell said, with 58 of those
related to N.C. State faculty, students and alumni. This year, the fund won a
Vision 2000 Special Recognition Award from the U.S. Small Business
Administration's Office of Advocacy.
Crowell said it is typically more difficult to raise the first $200,000 to
$500,000 needed to give birth to a new company than it is to raise the next $2
million to $5 million to grow it. That's because most investors do not want to
take the risk that naturally comes with the unproven idea of a new company.
Dykstra said another part of Crowell's mission will be "an outreach effort"
with faculty members to not only accept but embrace the idea of finding a
practical application for their intellectual property and selling it in the
marketplace.
"He knew what was here, he already had a lot of interaction with our faculty
because we and State have a number of joint projects, and he knew our faculty
was very interested in commercializing or considering the possibility of
commercializing the results of their research and were beginning to develop a
more entrepreneurial spirit about that," Dykstra said.
Dykstra said Carolina has a mandate as a public research university to share
the fruits of its research with the society it serves. There may be a financial
benefit to the campus, but that money is plowed back into financing more
research projects.
"The faculty expressed a desire to be educated and to learn about this process
and to learn more about the business aspects of commercializing their
research," Dykstra said. "Mark was very good at that at N.C. State and welcomes
the opportunity to do it here."
Crowell said he and Moeser also talked about the importance of finding new ways
to collaborate with both N.C. State and Duke in research efforts.
That collaboration should be a little easier now, Crowell said. His successor
at N.C. State will be David Winwood, someone he has worked closely with for the
past two-and-a-half years. Winwood was recruited to N.C. State from Carolina,
Crowell said.
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