For those who say that's savvy business planning.....no......I'm afraid that it is criminal and corrupt. As the City of Baltimore wasted on the vine, untold money moved to Hopkins by less than normal channels. Creation of one law and then another to allow circumvention of normal budgeting processes is called corruption. Obtaining tax breaks through disingenuous manipulations is criminal. The loss to the community surrounding these mechinations------deadly and devastating to many.
ALL THESE ELECTED OFFICIALS YOU FAIL TO COME OUT TO VOTE OUT OF OFFICE ARE DOING THIS TO YOUR CITY. MUCH OF THE MONEY USED IS YOUR TAX MONEY. WHETHER CITY COUNCIL, MARYLAND ASSEMBLY, OR FEDERAL HOUSE OR SENATE......THESE ARE THIRD WAY AND BLUE DOG DEMOCRATS MOVING MONEY TO CORPORATIONS.......WE WANT PROGRESSIVES IN OFFICE. LISTEN NEXT ELECTION FOR THE PROGRESSIVE CANDIDATE
Baltimore's "Next Economy"
WYPR Public Radio - Baltimore
The Brookings Institution recently released a report that looked at Baltimore’s current economy, and how the city could offer more and better-paying jobs. The report noted that although Baltimore has strengths, one of its weaknesses is turning scientific discoveries into actual new products and services. WYPR’s Sarah Richards spoke to some people working to change that.
Back in 1980, the federal government enacted the Bayh-Dole Act. The law allows universities to control intellectual property rights of inventions that were funded with federal research money. Bayh-Dole lead many universities to form ‘technology transfer’ offices. Those offices look for businesses willing to license the university’s innovative research. Schools like Stanford are known for their long-running and successful tech transfer operations. But it’s taken the universities in the Baltimore area longer to get on the bandwagon. Aris Melissaratos is the senior advisor for enterprise development at Johns Hopkins University.
“Our faculty exists for the sake of research. Our motto is the truth shall make you free, so they’re continually searching for truths in the universe. And anything that smacks of commercialization or materialistic pay-offs, they feel would stand in the way of research, so they never embraced this push towards commercialization.”
The Brookings report found the greater Baltimore area ranked high for its share of science and technology workers. And Johns Hopkins has been a national leader in the amount of money it spends on research -- $2 billion in the 2010 fiscal year, $1.7 billion of that coming from the federal government. But it’s slower than some other schools to sell those ideas to the marketplace. That’s where Melissaratos comes in. He used to be Maryland’s secretary for economic development. He’s been pushing Hopkins faculty to be more entrepreneurial—and he says it’s working.
“Our results have gone from $7 million worth of revenue from licenses and royalties five years ago to $15.1 or $15.2 million in the most recent fiscal year. So we’ve doubled our revenues… in the previous decade, we have spun out an average of four companies per year; in the last four years, we’ve spun out 51 companies, more than 12 per year.”
Melissaratos says most of those companies are in Maryland; about 10 Hopkins start-ups are operating in the new biopark near the hospital. That might not seem like much, but technology transfer is a tough business. Todd Sherer heads the Association of University Technology Managers—or ‘AUTM.’ He also directs technology transfer at Emory University. He says technology transfer is a ‘big hit’ industry—meaning universities patent a lot of duds before they find a discovery that a company is willing to produce.
“The reason is because of what drives revenue creation for the university is really royalties. We know this from our AUTM licensing survey that about 70% of the revenue universities receive are from royalties, which means companies selling a product, not us. And what it means is most of the money we’re generating is not a result of consummating a license, it’s the result of getting a license in place and then a company getting a product to market.”
And that can take years if it’s a pharmaceutical drug that has to win government approval—let alone get out of the testing phase. That’s one reason the University of Maryland Baltimore has been taking a second look at software innovations. Phil Robilotto is the university’s assistant vice president of technology transfer. He says faculty there disclose about 100 innovations a year to his office--and an increasing amount are potential software products. They might not cure obesity or cancer; but they’re easier to license and collect royalties on.
“We can pretty much commercialize them fairly quickly and they’re potentially very good products and they can definitely help with disease management systems and programs. We’re finding a lot of those. Those are more-they may not be a billion dollar product, but we get them out there sooner and quicker. And they will have hopefully kind of a steady, but maybe smaller, amount of jobs associated with them and revenue. So we’re trying to mix up our portfolio a little bit."
Still, he’s not writing off that break-through discovery in disease treatment that could make the school millions.
I'm Sarah Richards reporting in Baltimore for 88-1 WYPR.
As your report indicated, Johns Hopkins University has been a recipient of literally trillions of dollars in taxpayer money, much to the thanks of Barbara Mikulski (this is why she has a supernova named for her) and is therefore not entitled to move to a private patenting of any procedure or product coming from their work. They have called themselves a private university, but at no time in recent history can this university claim anything but a public organizational structure. They have used public money to their benefits from research to student grants, from healthcare to public health grants, from education funding both domestic and international to creating local charter schools soon to be private. On top of all this public benefit, they have escaped property taxes and soak up business tax credits as they grow their 'non-profit' organizations. I have an entire website about Hopkins and the Baltimore community.
This movement to privatize public work comes after a decade, and especially the last few years of unprecidented construction on campus, funded by federal and state grants under the guise of student achievement. The plan, as those who follow Wall Street and market economy, was to grow these public and private institutions with public money and then create global industries around education and technology-------private businesses that will.....yes guessed it, evade corporate taxes.
Stanford University Stanford University
Martin Groeger http://www.silicon-valley-story.de
Last modified: Mon Jul 8 06:35:21 PDT
The story of the Silicon Valley starts with Stanford University in Palo Alto, which has been of fundamental importance in the rise of the electronics industry in Santa Clara County.
In the 19th century, Spanish settlers, who have been the first white visitors to California, founded civilian communities and gave them Spanish names such as San Francisco, Santa Clara or San Jose. They liked the Mediterranean climate in the Santa Clara Va lley which was very hospitable. This area came to be used by farmers and ranchers cultivating orchards, for it provided "some of the world's finest farming soil.")
In 1887, Leland Stanford, a wealthy railroad magnate who owned a large part of the Pacific Railroad, decided to dedicate a university to his son's memory who had died due to a severe disease shortly before he intended to go to a university.
Leland Stanford and his wife built Leland Stanford Jr. University on 8,800 acres of farmland in Palo Alto and also donated 20 million dollars to it. The university opened in 1891 and "would in time become one of the world's great academic institutions.")
In 1912, Lee De Forest, who had invented the first vacuum tube, the three electrode audion, discovered the amplifying effect of his audion while working in a Federal Telegraph laboratory in Palo Alto. This was the beginning of the Electronics Age, and "ama teur radio became an obsession") at Stanford University.
The state of this university was changed fundamentally by Frederick Terman, who was the progenitor of the initial Silicon Valley boom. Today he is also known as the "godfather of Silicon Valley.") Terman was born in 1900, and as the son of a Stanford prof essor (who developed the Stanford-Binet IQ tests) he had grown up on the campus. After his graduation from Stanford University he decided to go East to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which was the leading university in technology then. He studied under Vannevar Bush, who was one of America's leading scientists, and was offered a teaching position at MIT after receiving his doctorate in 1924.
He returned to Palo Alto to visit his family before he intended to start at MIT, but he was caught by a severe case of tuberculosis which forced him to spend one year in bed. This made him finally decide to stay in Palo Alto and teach at Stanford Universit y because of the better climate in California.)
Terman became head of the department of engineering by 1937 and established a stronger cooperation between Stanford and the surrounding electronics industry to stop the brain drain caused by many students who went to the East after graduation, as they did not find a job in California then.)
The Varian brothers are an example of such a cooperation between university and industry. After graduation they founded a company upon a product they had developed at the Stanford laboratories. Their company, Varian Associates, was settled 25 miles from th e university and specialized on radar technology.
After World War II, the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was founded. Its aim was to provide the industry with more skilled students and to increase the number of companies in Santa Clara County.
Terman wanted companies to settle next to the university. In 1951, he founded the first high-technology industrial park, the Stanford Research Park, "where business, academic and government interests could come together in a synergistic vision of the futur e.") Portions of this land would be leased to companies, because the "original Stanford family land gift forbade the sale of any of its 8,800 acres.") These companies were offered close contacts to the SRI and could lease land for 99 years at a fixed pri ce which they had to pay in advance. The first firm to settle in this park was Varian Associates leasing land for $4,000 an acre, which was a good deal as there was no inflation clause in the agreement making this site today worth several hundred thousand dollars.
More and more firms - among them Hewlett-Packard as one of the first residents - settled their Research and Development (R&D) departments in this park, and they were to become the "core of the early explosive growth of Silicon Valley.") Today, there are m ore than 90 firms employing over 25,000 people.
During the Korean War the US government placed Stanford with a great deal of their projects which made more and more electronics companies (among them IBM and Lockheed) open R&D departments in Santa Clara County.
Due to his prepaid leasing program Terman received more than $18 million and, moreover, many companies endowed the university with gifts, which Terman used to hire qualified professors from all over the USA. Thus, he had created a mechanism which increased the settlement of the electronics industry.
The successful Stanford Research Park has served as a worldwide model for a lot of other high-technology parks.)