Anthony Atala wasn't planning to move. When recruiters at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, contacted him in 2002, Atala was establishing a centre for tissue engineering and cell therapies at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. Wake Forest and Piedmont Triad Research Park, the university's affiliate in the same city, were looking to establish their own centre.
"I had no intention of leaving Boston," says Atala. But he listened to the recruitment pitch and visited the site. A few statistics piqued his interest: North Carolina had just risen to the coveted number three spot on the list of top biotechnology states. It was also among the top states for biotechnology investment and for small-business research grants from the National Institutes of Health. The numbers appealed to Atala, who considers industry collaboration to be a key component of his research.
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK
Aerial view of Research Triangle Park member GlaxoSmithKline.
Back in Boston, Atala was struggling to recruit senior scientists. "It was easy to recruit the young scientist who is going to come and lease an apartment five blocks down," says Atala. But even with larger salaries, senior scientists looking to own their own homes may have to live an hour and a half away. North Carolina housing is cheaper, and although the locals love to complain about the traffic, the clogged highways of Massachusetts and California are far worse. In January 2004, Atala decided to move to Winston-Salem.
Although best known in technology circles for its venerable Research Triangle Park (RTP), North Carolina has several other parks. When the RTP turns 50 next year, nearby Centennial Campus in Raleigh will turn 25 (see 'Life in a technopolis'). The University of North Carolina (UNC) in Chapel Hill will next year start construction on a new research park to be called Carolina North. And in Kannapolis, once a mill town, some former textile workers will be busy taking biotechnology courses to prepare for the completion of the North Carolina Research Campus.
Many states have begun to turn to research parks to drive economic development. The competition is heating up and park administrators in North Carolina are bracing themselves for the challenge.
Striving to compete
The RTP is considered to be one of the best technology parks in the world. But while it jostles with parks in Maryland and New Jersey for the number three ranking in life sciences (that California and Massachusetts will remain ranked first and second is a foregone conclusion; the real race is for third place), research parks in China and India are also closing in. "If we're going to compete on a global scale, we're going to have to create larger networks," says Rick Weddle, chief executive of the Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina, which manages the RTP.
One strategy is uniting the North Carolina parks under a single brand to maximize the region's appeal to a wide range of companies. Each park has its own strengths. A large company looking to establish a major office in North Carolina would probably turn to the 2,800-hectare RTP. Atala himself says that he was not interested in the RTP; he wanted Piedmont's tight relationship between industry and academia.
Other companies may want to leave academia's shadow. Don Gabriel, a professor at the UNC and a co-founder of its spin-off Invitrox, which develops pharmaceutical assays, says he might have chosen the RTP even if the UNC's Carolina North were up and running. "We were trying to make the statement that we are an independent company," says Gabriel.
And then there are the topical specialities: the North Carolina Research Campus plans to focus on nutrition. That attracted BioMarker Group, a company that makes diabetes tests, from Winston-Salem. Meanwhile, the strength of North Carolina State University's engineering department lured Michael Creed, co-founder of McKim & Creed, an engineering consultancy firm, to Centennial Campus.
Last month, park directors from around the state had preliminary discussions on working together under the North Carolina brand. Weddle says that he sees the RTP playing the role of sales portal, as companies interested in North Carolina usually contact the RTP first. The RTP Foundation could then help companies choose their best location — even if that location is not within the RTP. Weddle claims competition within the state is limited. "Rather, we'll be competing on a global scale with other locations that have similar technology footprints," he says.
"We'd all like to bask in the glory of the RTP," says Mark Crowell, the UNC's associate vice-chancellor for economic development and technology transfer. "And frankly, the RTP is going to run out of land at some point."
Shifting focus
WFUBMC;RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK
Anthony Atala left Harvard for North Carolina. The Research Triangle Park (above) aims to attract more scientists to the state.
The RTP has also tried to diversify to make itself more resilient to economic change. Despite a lull in the information-technology sector around 2000, the past few years have been lucrative. The park has recruited 18 new firms since 2004, creating more than 6,300 new jobs.
In some cases, diversification has meant recruiting from those not traditionally associated with research parks. Among the RTP's biggest deals in the past three years were large parcels of land sold to the financial-sector companies Credit Suisse and Fidelity. "It has enabled us to move way, way up the food chain in terms of average salaries," says Weddle, who adds that the financial firms, with their large data banks and private software development, are not far removed from the park's traditional focus on information technology.
Over the past decade, the park has also tripled the number of companies with 250 or fewer employees. Small firms are a focal point for growth, says Weddle. For Joseph Izatt, a biomedical engineer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who co-founded a biological-imaging spin-off called Bioptigen, moving the business to an RTP incubator was an obvious choice. The location is close to companies such as GlaxoSmithKline that could become collaborative partners. "It's kind of a no-brainer to go to the park," says Izatt. "It makes us feel like a real, grown-up company."
Nurturing start-ups is particularly important in North Carolina given the paucity of local venture-capital firms. "We have less than ten funds," says Robert Taber, director of science and technology at Duke University. "It's an order of magnitude difference from Boston and California." One reason, says Taber, may be that the RTP has not produced a major, homegrown biotech success. "People don't realize the impacts of the Genentechs and the Biogens and the Genzymes," says Taber, referring to large biotech firms in California and Massachusetts.
Atala does not regret his decision to move. The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine now has about 150 employees. Space constraints would have made such speedy expansion impossible in Boston, he says. And early worries that losing the Harvard affiliation might make recruiting harder were unfounded. "It turned out that I had the opposite problem," says Atala. "All these people wanted to come, and I ended up having to make the tough decisions."
Life in a Technopolis
It's a warm spring afternoon, and 'Hungry Hank' Roberts, proprietor of Hungry Hank's Hotdogs, has set up his cart in North Carolina State University's Centennial Campus in Raleigh. It looks out of place: hotdog stands belong on city corners, not in research parks.
H. LEDFORD
Centennial Campus: somewhere to live, work and play.
Yet Hungry Hank (pictured) has a steady stream of customers from around the campus. As his patrons linger to socialize, it becomes clear why the property managers invited Hank. A chatty hotdog vendor and a sunny day create the perfect blend for social networking.
It is part of the campus's aim to create a 'technopolis' where researchers can live, work and play. That model is growing in popularity, according to a 2007 report from the Association of University Research Parks, and Centennial Campus's emphasis on lifestyle helped earn it the association's 2007 'Outstanding Research Science Park' award. The state government has supported a 'Millennium Campuses' initiative to create similar parks across the state.
Still, much of the campus's 445-hectare area has not been developed. Although the buildings are nearly at full capacity, the campus has only 1,900 corporate and government employees, far short of the 12,500 it hopes to have when construction is complete. Over the years, the campus has cultivated a mix of large and small companies, government offices and university buildings. And down the road, a new park called Centennial Biomedical Campus is currently under construction. The biomedical park plans to open 150,000 square metres of working space over the next 25 years.
Of the three major universities in the 'research triangle' — Duke University in Durham, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University — the last has its feet planted most firmly in the applied sciences. Companies at Centennial Campus reflect the university's strengths in materials science, agriculture and engineering. Centennial partnership developer Amy Lubas jokingly refers to the site of its future golf course — now a vast smear of red clay soil — as the park's "turf-management project", then quickly turns serious. "No really," she says. "North Carolina State University does have one of the top turf-management programmes in the country."
H.L.