University engages biz community

TALKING SHOP: University of Rhode Island’s Business Engagement Center Executive Director Katharine Hazard Flynn, speaks with Portsmouth Business Development’s William E. Clark, yellow tie, and Raymond Sepe, president and CEO of Electro Standards Laboratories, at the “We Mean Business Expo.” / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD
TALKING SHOP: University of Rhode Island’s Business Engagement Center Executive Director Katharine Hazard Flynn, speaks with Portsmouth Business Development’s William E. Clark, yellow tie, and Raymond Sepe, president and CEO of Electro Standards Laboratories, at the “We Mean Business Expo.” / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD

Just days after the Sept. 5 launch of the University of Rhode Island’s Business Engagement Center, Executive Director Katharine Hazard Flynn was out in the business community making connections.
At the “We Mean Business Expo” at the Crowne Plaza Providence-Warwick in Warwick on Sept. 10, Flynn handed out brochures and business cards and worked the floor, talking with business owners, including Ray Sepe Sr., president and CEO of Cranston-based Electro Standards Laboratories, and committing to speak at an East Greenwich Chamber of Commerce Business After Hours meeting on Sept. 24.
Though such centers are increasingly sprouting up nationally, other Rhode Island college and university representatives say that, with the exception of the John H. Chafee Center for International Business at Bryant University, there is nothing else like the new URI center in the state.
The point of Flynn’s awareness-raising efforts was not lost on Sepe, whose company does research, manufactures products and provides services found in communications and computer rooms around the world. Sepe, whose company already has a working relationship with students and faculty at URI and other Rhode Island schools, was eager to learn more.
“URI has the correct attitude to work with businesses,” Sepe said, “but I was pleased to see they’ve actually formalized it.”
The new center “will allow more resources to be available to the university that are available to industry as a necessity,” he said. “Universities can benefit by having relationships with companies like ours, because we have technologies we’ve developed that would be helpful to university curriculums, training and internships.”
The new business-engagement center, which includes Flynn, a small staff and a Web portal, is the “front door” through which companies recruiting workers, faculty seeking support for business-related academic research and students seeking internships can find each other, Flynn says.
In a state rich with public and private schools that work hard to connect students with real-world experiences to help narrow the skills gap and keep jobs here, URI’s center is part of a growing and potentially pivotal national trend.
Universities across the country are turning more and more toward establishing Business Engagement Centers like URI’s in order to promote mutually beneficial relationships between the schools, the business community and students, according to Daryl Weinert, associate vice president for research and a former founding executive director of the BEC at the University of Michigan.
“It’s a holistic approach to corporate relations,” Weinert told Providence Business News in a recent phone interview. “You’re not just one dimensional, only going to companies for philanthropy. You’re going to them as a partner. Within the next 10 to 12 years, all of the tier-one research institutions will have a function like this or an office like this. It goes hand in hand with the increasing role academia is being asked to play in economic development.” Familiar with Weinert’s work in Michigan, URI President David M. Dooley told the audience at the Sept. 5 launch that developing new ways to strengthen and extend business relationships is critical to the health of both the university and the state.
“It will be easy to tell if we are successful,” he assured the crowd of approximately 100. “Rhode Island’s economy will get better. People will get jobs. Rhode Island will become a net importer of people.”
By funneling contact through Flynn’s office, academia and industry can more easily interact, he later told PBN. That in turn will help retain graduates in the state’s workforce, enable businesses to partner with the university and more effectively compete in the marketplace and hopefully, at some level, boost philanthropic business investments in URI in a world of declining public funding.
“What we’re really doing is fostering and managing mutually beneficial, productive relationships,” Dooley said. “This is all about creating value for your private-sector partners, and that, in turn creates great value for the university.”
Like at the University of Michigan, the BEC model has surfaced in various incarnations at Northwestern University, Kansas State University and numerous other schools across the country. Mitzi Richards, senior director of corporate and foundation relations for the KSU Foundation, and co-president of the Network of Academic Corporate Relations Officers, an organization espousing the type of connections these centers foster, said URI is on the cutting edge. The network has grown since 2006 from 40 to 400 participants and has 120 academic research institutions as members, she said.
“There are tons of universities who are moving in this direction,” Richards said. “And URI is leading the way. They’ve put themselves in the game. They are not waiting for this to be spelled out. They’re taking the lead.”
She called the establishment of business-engagement centers “a megatrend. There are shrinking resources and there is a demand for collaboration,” she added. “Government, industry, higher learning – we all need to work together to maximize our efforts, to collaborate around big, audacious ideas that will have societal impact.”
At KSU’s BEC, Director Richard Potter said he is working with the company Caterpillar to develop a degree-completion program for student welders that could meet the business’ needs. The path includes a certificate program offered by the company, an associate degree offered by Manhattan Area Technical College and a bachelor’s degree from KSU.
“We’re just rolling this out now and have no students yet, but it’s our way of responding to a corporate need,” Potter said. “It’s a very strong retention tool: When they’ve got a very strong welder on the floor they want to keep, it’s a good way for them to hang onto him or her.” The small URI office manned by Flynn, an administrative assistant and, eventually, another staff member, will make it easier for businesses to navigate the at-times unwieldy university system as they try to connect with university students, faculty and resources, Flynn said.
“There are so many entry points for industry that I think having a central portal made sense on both sides,” she said. “For people internally who might get a call they can’t handle, they can say, ‘You can call the BEC.’ Or, for people outside of the university who don’t know who to call, it’s a lot more efficient to have one place to call to get them where they need to be.”
Dooley, who came to URI in 2009 from Montana State University, said his vision for URI comes from a deeper conviction nurtured during the 10 years he served as provost and vice president for academic affairs at MSU. There, he got a taste of what it’s like to coordinate contacts and build university relationships with the private sector, he said.
At URI, Dooley sees potential for the state’s flagship university to fill “an indispensible role in helping the Rhode Island economy become more productive and competitive.” It’s a role that exemplifies the school’s mission as a land-grant research university dedicated to improving the welfare of the community beyond campus walls, he says.
GTECH Corp. in Providence and Toray Plastics (America) Inc. in North Kingstown exemplify the type of relationships URI has already managed to build, and wants to continue to nurture, Dooley said.
Robert K. Vincent, GTECH’s senior vice president for corporate communications and a URI alum, detailed the work URI students from the Harrington School of Communications have done recently to help write requests for proposals for lucrative contracts that could be worth tens of millions of dollars to the company.
GTECH is in the process of submitting one such proposal as it competes for government lottery contracts, he said.
“It’s a high priority, and the students get to see in a very real way what it takes to be successful,” Vincent said. “You have time pressure, the pressure of a major opportunity, so you have to get it right, and those are great experiences for students that they’ll benefit from. What’s in it for us is, we often hire from our intern pool. So, it’s a great way to both train potential employees as well as to screen them.”
Besides being beneficial to both students and companies, existing business relationships and new ones developed through the center have the potential to yield philanthropic investments as well. With Toray, Dooley said, “we’re doing research that’s relevant to their product development and manufacturing processes, and they can use the results of that research. Once a company like Toray sees a value like that, they become interested in making investments.”
Two years ago, for instance, Toray provided $1 million to support graduate education, Dooley said.
He and Flynn, who also serves as director of corporate and foundation relations for the URI Foundation, are quick to point out, however, that such benefits are not the primary reason for setting up the center. Flynn, who helped research the business-engagement center concept and construct, says that partnering is its own reward.
“We may raise research funds,” she said. “There may be a philanthropic component to this, but it’s not the lead, not the chief responsibility. But what Michigan has found is that as they’ve engaged more and more of industry, industry has given back.”
URI’s business-engagement center is funded with a $250,000 operating budget through the URI Foundation, Dooley’s 21st Century Fund and the provost’s office.
Flynn and Ray Fogarty, director of the Chafee Center, which is primarily international in scope, have already had conversations about how the two centers can support one another, both leaders said.
“We’re going to complement what they’re doing and help each other,” said Fogarty, “because there really are limited resources in the state, and we can work best by working collaboratively and not duplicating efforts.”
Bob Twomey, Waterbury, Conn.-based Webster Bank’s regional president for Massachusetts and Rhode Island, liked what he heard at the Sept. 5 launch.
“I think it’s great to see URI taking this initiative and bringing together the resources of the state university,” he said.
He worried that the new center may duplicate what is already provided by an “alphabet soup” of agencies supporting small business – from the Small Business Administration to the R.I. Economic Development Corporation. But he said that if the BEC can “make resources available, it’s worth a try.”
Governmental agencies are valuable, Dooley said, but they haven’t yet successfully leveraged the resources of the state’s two research universities, URI and Brown.
“It’s possible to do a lot more by being more systematic, diligent and comprehensive [and] building these relationships to foster economic growth,” he said.
Weinert, who visited URI on May 9 to describe the progress the University of Michigan has made, says business-engagement centers have the capacity to accelerate and improve on connections between a school and the business community. For example, when the center introduces a startup company to a larger company as its first client, “You don’t want to call that lucky,” he said. “Because you have this focal point, you’re increasing the odds of those good things happening.” •

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