Ohio industry and the state of Ohio are very supportive of both The Ohio State University and the entire Ohio university system. Just one example: Ohio Third Frontier is the state’s largest ever initiative to grow Ohio’s innovative assets, connecting engineering partners, creating jobs and catalyzing innovation statewide. Since its initiation in 2002, Ohio Third Frontier has leveraged more than $3.5 billion in additional resources to projects at the commercial and university level.

Yet we all know the industrial base in our state has been slowly eroding, with Ohio’s unemployment rate this February and March hitting its highest percentage since 1984.

It’s now time for the state and for Ohio industry to reap the benefits of their investments in our state’s economy, and Ohio State and our College of Engineering are helping.

We often measure economic achievements in the number of new jobs created and new companies formed. One successful state-university-industry partnership is CMPND, the Center for Multifunctional Polymer Nanomaterials and Devices. Backed by three grants totaling $38.5 million from the state, CMPND has coordinated collaborations between university researchers and Ohio businesses that have resulted in nearly 240 new or retained research and development and manufacturing jobs; $37 million in new sales; and $68 million in new funding for the collaborations.

In addition to the formation of new companies and jobs, other important advantages result when higher education partners with industry and the state to bolster economic development. Here are examples from our College of Engineering:

1. Research engagement with industry on products and processes they find useful: Since 2005, more than 275 individual companies have collaborated with the College of Engineering. Of this number, the most active 25 invested at least $470,000, and more than 140 have invested at least $50,000. The maximum amount invested by a single company exceeds $4 million.
2. Significant improvements in plant safety: College of Engineering researchers have helped Honda of America Manufacturing Inc. reduce lost work time related to injuries by more than 80 percent.
3. Human resource development: We are preparing our students to meet the challenges in this new century. In this decade, nearly 50 percent of our graduates stayed in the state after finding employment here. For instance, since 2000, more than 135 GE engineers have received their master’s or doctoral degrees from Ohio State. And more than 110 engineers with Ohio State degrees are employees of Honda Research, exceeding 20 percent of the company’s engineering workforce.
4. Product enhancement and development: Ohio State researchers have made improvements in fan rub dynamics and turbine heat transfer that have contributed to improved efficiency, performance and CO2 emissions for future GE Aviation engines. In addition, our researchers are working with Ford to measure, for the first time, the dynamics of all the internal components of a planetary gear. The precision experiments will lead to the development of quieter transmissions in applications such as cars, helicopters and wind turbines and have been credited with saving a major engine program at Ford’s Volvo division. And four major improvements on the 2008 Honda Accord emanate from the Honda-Ohio State collaboration.
5. New product development: Teams of Ohio State engineering and business students are strategically transforming product lines of existing Ohio companies through our Ohio Innovation Initiative. The student teams focus primarily on the adaptation of a company’s products to new applications or markets.

While we are clearly moving forward, we still have a long way to go. We look forward to your suggestions.

Our engineering students continue to be forward-thinking and business-oriented! A group of College of Engineering students have partnered with students from the Fisher College of Business to create the Ohio State Society of Business Engineers,whose primary objective is to increase the business perspective, professionalism and leadership of its members through activities and experiences outside the traditional academic environment.

SoBE hosted its first event on April 20.  The group invited Christine Poon, Dean of the Fisher College of Business, and me to speak about the “Guidelines to Technical Leadership” and “Taking Risks to Achieve Success.”  I enjoyed this great opportunity to meet the current members of SoBE and learn more about the group.  I encourage all engineering students to consider joining SoBE and getting involved in the business of engineering!

According to NSF, the atmosphere for industrial research is beginning to recover after declining every year since 2001. Between 2001 and 2004, industry-supported university R&D decreased by about $100 million, to $2.1 billion, only to rebound 7.7 percent in 2005, the NSF reports.

There are several reasons for this uncertainty. An alarming number of highly prominent and visible industrial leaders are citing that negotiations over sponsored project agreements and disagreements over the treatment of intellectual property (IP) are negatively affecting the entire industry-university research partnership in the United States. Some companies claim that these issues are forcing them to sponsor research projects at foreign institutions. In addition, the type of research that companies support has been changing. During the last 10 years, companies have been directing more university research dollars toward university research in biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technologies and, recently, alternative energy. Less support is being spent on research in the physical sciences (except biological sciences), manufacturing, design and infrastructure.

While the overall uncertainty may be problematic to some, the data does show that industrial support has become more concentrated in fewer institutions. Between 1993 and 2004, the total number of institutions receiving more than 10 percent of their funds from industry has declined from 179 to 101.
During this same period of uncertainty, Ohio State’s College of Engineering has held its own, increasing its industrial R&D funding by 3 percent from 2001 to 2004 and by more than 20 percent from 2001 to 2006. There are three main reasons for this increase:

1. The College of Engineering has developed a number of strong relationships with national and multinational corporations.
2. The college has aggressively established active industrial consortia.
3. The college has been able to capitalize on the rich industrial and manufacturing heritage of Ohio and the surrounding states. In fact, Ohio State is ranked third among all universities and colleges in industry-financed research expenditures for fiscal year 2005. A large portion of that research is conducted in the College of Engineering.

In order to maintain our national dominance in industrial research, the College of Engineering will work with the university and our industrial partners to develop innovative IP strategies, graduate student and faculty corporate internships, and long-term collaborative corporate research partnerships.