Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
parks, and other institutions throughout Portugal'' (UTEN
2009
). Under UTEN
one of the present authors (Phillips) has gone to Lisbon each summer with US
colleagues to evaluate proposals from Portuguese researchers to the Fundação para
a Ciência e a Tecnologia, the Portuguese national science foundation.
In Austin, the team attended training on market-based entrepreneurship, learned about
government-sponsored and private funding opportunities and models… and visited with
entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, business angels, IP lawyers, and professors from the IC
2
Institute's Master of Science in Technology Commercialization program (UTEN
2009
).
Portugal's government has provided more than € 50 million for UTEN-related
initiatives within Portugal and with the three US universities. Business-sector
partners contributed a few million additional euros in 2009 (Fischer
2010
).
UTEN's missions are to:
• ''Overcome a historic gulf in Portugal between academe and industry, an insular
higher education system, and a business climate with little tolerance for risk''
(Fischer
2010
).
• Encourage Portuguese universities to work together on common research
problems. ''Individually, many of the country's 13 public universities lack the
capacity to tackle large-scale research projects'' (ibid).
• Internationalize the educational experiences of Portuguese students.
Fischer (
2010
) adds,
…the Portuguese strategy is, at least in its conception, top-down, driven by government
initiative. In Portugal, however, those government officials are also academics—both
Mariano Gago, the longtime minister of science, technology, and higher education, and
Mr. Heitor, the secretary of state, or deputy minister, are former engineering professors.
UTEN's annual report (UTEN
2009
) lists a dozen viable companies in each
stage of growth (start-up, growth, mature) that have benefited from the program,
and notes these spin-off benefits are additional to significant progress on the
academic and entrepreneurial culture-change objectives.
3 Kansas City's Life Sciences Cluster
The making of life science clusters primarily require three main ingredients:
(i) proprietary science that can support a wide array of commercially viable
products, (ii) risk capital, and (iii) science and entrepreneurial talents. While all
key ingredients are indispensable, the research centers of excellence are central.
All life science clusters emerge around prominent universities and research
institutions, which provide the intellectual base both in terms of highly trained
human capital and proprietary technologies. These three key ingredients are pre-
requisites for the creation of a life science cluster but for it to thrive, a confluence
of other factors is needed—environmental, infrastructural, and cultural.
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