Silicon Valley in California is even more impressive than the high-tech array in Austin. It grew from a Stanford University decision to take the lead in electronics education by paying the price for a faculty including a Nobel Prize winner.
The stars on the faculty of each campus attracted still more stars who wanted to work with them. Industries located nearby to tap into their talent pool.
Why can't the University of Hawaii do the same? The question comes from Barry Raleigh, dean since 1989 of UH's then-new School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology.
SOEST puts its umbrella over natural areas of strength for Hawaii: oceanography, geology/geophysics, meteorology, ocean engineering, marine biology and natural energy development. A coup was to get the U.S. Weather Bureau to co-locate its Hawaii center with the SOEST meteorology center on the UH campus. The interaction of the two benefits both. Couldn't it be done more widely?
SOEST doesn't oversee UH's Institute for Astronomy, which manages the world's best space-viewing sites on Mauna Kea, but the two interact.
In an example of private cooperation that could be expanded SOEST is cooperating with SETS, one of Hawaii's first successful high-tech companies, to develop aerial mapping of coral reefs that can quickly discriminate between dead and living reefs and monitor changes.
A Raleigh-created task force has recommended that UH policies be changed at the regents level to promote more business-UH cooperation.
The "publish or perish" rule for faculty promotions at UH and elsewhere now pays no attention to unpublished technical achievements such as SOEST cooperation in developing the highly stable Navatek cruise boats. "There needs to be an established policy that rewards technological innovation as the equivalent to teaching," the task force said. It also recomended more official UH cooperation in bringing business and faculty together.
UH already has a relatively generous policy of allowing faculty to share 50 percent of the royalties from their patentable works, but the UH 50 percent may not filter to the department that generated the patent as an incentive for more ventures.
"Enterpreneurial activities are considered well outside the mainstream of university life," the task force said.
RALEIGH is convinced Hawaii can achieve significant technological business growth with more incentives to the growth-makers in business and on the campus.
A gift from industrialist David Packard helped get Stanford on its way. Raleigh is enough of an optimist to think UH might somehow get a similar boost.
As have many before it, the task force noted the negative impact of Hawaii being recognized only as a tourist destination, and thus a frivolous site for high tech. The dilemma here is that we need high-tech successes to overcome the image but the image meantime impedes our progress. More marketing cooperation encouraged from the highest levels of business and government seems imperative. Adding a Nobel laureate to the SOEST faculty might be an early attention-getter.