University of Idaho research park makes a key connection

In this column, we talk with Doug McQueen, executive director of the University of Idaho Research Park in Post Falls and a Biotechnology Association of the Spokane Region board member.

Patrick Jones
Special to The Spokesman-Review

Doug, how long have you been at the University of Idaho Research Park?

I just started my seventh year.

Where were you before you arrived in Post Falls?

I came from Arizona — Tempe, where I developed Arizona State University’s Research Park. For three years, I was also the executive director for the whole Research Park Association, which has most of the American parks and those from about 30-40 other countries around the world.

What do research parks do?

Let me insert the word "university" in your question. "University" research parks provide the connection between academic research and that being done by private companies. I emphasize "university" because there’s a lot of confusion out there about what we do, and how we’re different. A lot of people think that we’re just another real estate development. And actually, without the university connection, we would be.

But that makes all the difference in the world. Our priority is to make that marriage work. We’re all about the transfer of technology between universities and the companies that create products from them.

As executive director of the Association of University Research Parks, you saw a big jump in the number of parks in the 1980’s and 1990’s, didn’t you? What was behind this jump?

Two things actually sparked by the same legislation, the Bayh/Dole Act, in, I think, it was in 1982. About 60 percent to 70 percent of the parks in existence today were started between 1982 and 1990.

Bayh/Dole did two things: it reduced the amount of money it had been granting to the universities. But it allowed a bigger incentive to university researchers to get credit — and money — for their inventions, patents, and copyrights. It essentially privatized the research business.

Universities wound up with more research going on, and less money to support it. So research parks were seen as a way to house the growing research projects, and were a moneymaker as well, since most of us had land we didn’t know what to do with. So, from the start, we’ve been a healthy mix of tech transfer and real estate development.

Where does the money typically come from to build university research parks?

We beg, borrow, steal, cajole, negotiate. And we all spend a lot of our time trying to find new answers.

But typically, we all get some sort of initial government support. Then we are expected to leverage it for future expansion. At the UIRP, I get a small budget from the university which goes mainly for salaries and benefits. My first building was mostly from federal grants, and I pay my bills with the rent I charge to my tenants.

Bigger, richer, states usually get more than we did in Idaho. For instance, at ASU we started with a $13 million bond, and added another $7 million before we even started to pay it back. Other schools had even more. But being a small school and park is helping us now, during this nationwide funding crisis. We have less to pay back!

The UIRP has been officially open a year. Are you full?

Yes, I call it the good news and the bad news. It’s good that we’re full — with nine companies, three university institutes, and two federal labs — which is a nice mix. But the bad news is that we don’t have room for any more, or for the ones I’ve got to expand. And I don’t have the money to build another building.

What kind of technologies are your tenants developing?

Our most prominent tenant is the Center for Advanced Microelectronics and Biomolecular Research. These are the guys that we brought back from an eight-year sojourn in New Mexico. Gary Maki is the director, and his wife, Wusi, is the biomolecular part of the team. CAMBR’s focus has been on chip design that is radiation-tolerant for deep space equipment, with low power requirements. Their new biotech side is using similar technology to put into equipment to analyze foodstuffs at the molecular level.

Larry Branen heads another UI Institute that does similar work with food analyses. And we have a nascent GIS cluster. Right now they’re perfecting a spectrometer camera that can provide a lot of data for analyzing the health of forests and crops.

Our two federal agencies are the Water Division of USGS, and an expansion office of INEEL. And our private companies do a wide range of business and technology. What’s nice about the research park is that there is a lot of interaction among all of them.

Have you faced difficulties attracting faculty from Moscow to take space?

Yes. We, like most universities, still operate on an old system of rewards — mostly stay home and publish. We’re trying to change that paradigm to one of entrepreneurial reward, but it’s a long, hard road. I remember our former Engineering Dean, Dick Jacobsen, told me when I first got here, that it was going to be tough because, "90 percent of the faculty will not be interested at all in what you’re doing up there." I said, "Great! Show me the 10 percent!"

What kind of expansion plans does the UIRP have?

The way the park is masterplanned, we will have about a million square feet of office and lab space on 100 acres. We plan to build as many university buildings as we need. But most of the buildings in the park are expected to be those of private companies. We’ve set aside 28 acres for a Science and Technology Campus, but we’re still a couple of years away from financial security statewide.

Do you have any predictions about biotechnology spinoffs from the University of Idaho that might come to the UIRP in the future?

Yes. That’s a real bright spot for us. The work that CAMBR and Larry Branen’s group are doing, I think, will result in some nice business development. Maki’s team has spun off businesses in New Mexico and Maryland, and both he and Branen are pretty close to business spinoffs here.

Don Jacklin was a big sponsor of the recent mule cloning project the first in the world! So I’m hoping some of that might wind up here. And I think I’ve told you about another UI scientist that had planned to be here, but hasn’t made it yet. His work is still going strong in Moscow, so I think it’s only a matter of time.

•Patrick Jones, Ph.D., is executive director of the Biotechnology Association of the Spokane Region.

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