The Baton Rouge Area Chamber held a small ceremony on March 8 at LSU’s South Campus that was attended by officials from Louisiana Economic Development, LSU and Southern University, and at least one local legislator.
“This is an exciting day,” said Meg Mahoney, BRAC’s senior vice president of product development. “It is a day that we will be able to look back upon and know that innovation and entrepreneurship were greatly impacted in an important and meaningful way for our region.”
Mahoney touted two proposals: the creation of a true university research park on the South Campus, and the formation of a “regional innovation organization” headed by an innovation czar to be named later. The recommendations follow a six-month study of the region’s strengths and needs by a consultant team.
To anyone who has followed efforts to establish a local research park over the past two decades, the announcement might have felt oddly familiar.
In 1993, the state paid $4.1 million to landowner Phil Witter for 109 acres near Jefferson Highway and Corporate Boulevard, with the stated intention of creating a research park around LSU’s Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices. Four years later, Witter sued, claiming he had been grossly underpaid for the land, and in an out-of-court settlement he won the right to buy most of it back. These days, CAMD’s neighbors include Towne Center at Cedar Lodge, Marriott Residence Inn and an apartment complex.
Next, board members of the nonprofit Research Park Corp. set their sights on the Bon Carré development on Florida Boulevard, where a developer had tried and failed to revitalize the old Bon Marché shopping center. The state committed nearly $40 million over seven years to create Louisiana Technology Park, which features a massive data center. LTP opened in 2000.
Several high-tech companies, perhaps most notably TraceSecurity, have gestated in LTP’s business incubator. But the park clearly hasn’t lived up to the hype that surrounded its founding, which some officials reportedly compared to the arrival of Standard Oil in 1909. Part of the problem might be the lack of a strong university connection. Anyone can open an office park, but without a university association, you’re basically left with a speculative real estate deal, some say.
“We’re very strong believers in the linkages between universities, the professors, the technology transfer offices and the research park that they’re aligned with,” says Chris Engle, chief project officer with consultant New Economy Strategies. “LSU is the critical anchor piece to the successful research park.”
The proposed South Campus research park will carry the LSU brand, sport similar architecture and go up near the LSU-affiliated Louisiana Business & Technology Center incubator. It’ll be five miles down Nicholson Drive from the main campus, and it would seem logical for the university to have shuttle buses make frequent trips back and forth.
“The beauty of a research park is, you have people coming in from multiple disciplines,” says Charlie D’Agostino, who directs LBTC. “A green technology person meeting with a coastal management person meeting with somebody in food sciences. Then all of a sudden, they come up with an idea that crosses between sciences.” And from a new idea, a game-changing company can emerge.
D’Agostino is widely expected to be named the new research park’s director, although that decision has not been announced. His LBTC moved to the South Campus shortly after the land was acquired in 2005, and he says the property was always intended for economic development. He says the March 8 announcement was nice for promoting the research-park concept to the media, but adds the master plan has been finished for more than a year and the business plan is 90% complete.
LSU intends to lease the land to a private developer that would agree to various covenants and restrictions to protect the park’s integrity. An LSU-linked foundation would oversee the project. The National Guard building slated to open this summer is a good start, but D’Agostino cautions the public not to expect 20 buildings to spring up at once. Two buildings a year would be a success, he says, and Engle says he would expect the park to grow every year.
Once again, the state will be expected to make an investment for a research park. This time, organizers are looking for $10 million to complete the 187-acre footprint between Nicholson and GSRI, plus $5 million for infrastructure, dispersed over four years. Skeptical legislators dealing with massive projected deficits will have to be convinced the project will benefit the entire state, and not just Baton Rouge.
“I’m very optimistic that this session we’ll be able to get funding,” says Rep. Franklin Foil, a Baton Rouge Republican. “I tell people that economic development is good for the state, and LSU is an asset of the state.”
The exact duties of the regional innovation organization and its executive director are still to be determined. Consultants recommend a national search for a charismatic, media-savvy leader who would serve as an adviser to existing incubators, develop a strategy to fill gaps in the area’s business-development services, develop a formal entrepreneurship mentoring program and create a network of early stage capital providers, among other tasks.
“If you’re an entrepreneur and you get off the plane in Baton Rouge, where do you go?” Mahoney says. “A year from now, we want the answer to be, you go to the regional innovation organization.”
The Research Park Corp. seems to be the natural choice for the regional innovation organization. The board has representation from LSU, Southern, BRAC and Louisiana Economic Development; it has had a slot open for a new president since Eddie Ashworth left the job in 2008. Ashworth remains on the board, which was expected to take up the issue at its March 23 meeting.
Finding ways to get LTP, LBTC and the Louisiana Emerging Technology Center to leverage their assets and work together was one of the stated reasons for hiring the consultants in the first place. Ashworth became the Research Park’s first full-time president in 2000, replacing D’Agostino, who had been splitting time with his job at LBTC.
“Leadership was an issue, clearly,” Baton Rouge Area Foundation CEO and former Research Park board member John Davies told Business Report in 2000. “Charles D’Agostino had done a fabulous job for us for years, but he had the incubator at LSU.” Critics say Ashworth and D’Agostino haven’t worked well together since.
For the record, Mahoney says, “The incubators work better together than people might think.” She says the different incubators might sign a memorandum of understanding laying out ground rules for future cooperation; a draft summary of the implementation plan says the incubators have already agreed to a list of shared efforts.
D’Agostino says it won’t be the RIO director’s job to manage the LSU incubators.
“That person is not going to be my boss [or] Arthur Cooper’s boss at the Emerging Technology Center,” he says. “We will meet on a regular basis. We will talk about doing joint programs together. We will coordinate things. I’m not reporting to him. As our LSU chancellor and president said, LSU people work for LSU people.”
New Economy Strategies, Innovation Associates and the Association of University Research Parks are listed as the consultants who conducted the six-month research project. BRAC, LSU, the LSU System Research and Technology foundation, Southern University, LED and Research Park Corp. have endorsed forming the regional innovation organization and creating the new research park, BRAC says.
THREE TO GET READY
Baton Rouge’s three primary incubators—?Louisiana Business & Technology Center, Louisiana Emerging ?Technology Center and Louisiana Technology Park—have agreed to:
• Create a single admissions committee for all three incubators
• Maintain a master calendar of all activities, meetings and seminars related to entrepreneurship
• Host a CEO forum for incubated companies
• Create an internal listserv for tenants in all three facilities to access each other and share professional expertise
• Create a common Web portal for entrepreneurial services in the region
• Develop a shared MBA placement program to provide assistance to all three incubators
• Combine training programs and workshops
• Develop a common public-relations strategy and coordinate all public messages
• Provide a clearly designated path for companies entering the pipeline
• Align admissions based on areas of expertise, sending early stage startups and engineering/environmental technologies businesses to LBTC, life sciences companies to LETC, and information technology and digital media startups to LTP. The Southern University Incubator Program “should be aligned on these same measures through participation in the regional innovation organization,” the document says, without spelling out the specifics.
The plan also recommends setting rents at comparable market rates, creating formal entrance and exit policies, and adopting common measures and reporting systems.
