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Panel III: Illinois Innovation Initiatives
Pages 82-98

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From page 82...
... One is its entrepreneurial bent, which had never been lost to mass production as it had been elsewhere. Chicago had always been the business capital, and had never been a one-industry town dependent on mass production.
From page 83...
... I often say, life is like driving in an impenetrable fog; in front we can only see five feet away, but in the rear view mirror, everything is perfectly clear. We prepare for the future by focusing on the development of our students' thinking skills that will serve them for the long haul." In engineering, he said, the foundation of education is analytical skills -- logical, left-brain thinking; rational, analytic, pattern seeking; solution solving; sorting and organizing.
From page 84...
... The format combines students from McCormick, the law school, the Kellogg School of Management, and the Feinberg School of Medicine. The students pool their knowledge and insights with the objective of producing new medical devices.
From page 85...
... It attracts capital, but more important, it attracts additional talent, and people want to work where the best talent is. New York City offers the features of finance and the arts; San Francisco offers digital consumer technology, Boston biotechnology, LA lifestyle, San Diego telecom, Minneapolis medical devices, and so on.
From page 86...
... It includes new exhibits, refreshed exhibits, and an enriched education program called the Institute of Quality Science Teaching. "We teach science teachers -- especially in middle school -- how to teach science.
From page 87...
... "We'll never be Silicon Valley, but it seems that everyone here finally understands that. We need to find our own way," he said, but he cited encouraging signs that the Chicago region was gathering critical entrepreneurial abilities and building its own kind of innovation ecosystem.
From page 88...
... He recalled people's lively interest in what he was doing, questions about his experience, and eagerness to connect him with other entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who might be involved in similar technologies. At the second party, in Chicago, he found the usual conversation about sports, real estate, and banking.
From page 89...
... "We are seeing that successful innovation communities tend to be good at three things: education, so the people in the community improve their skills; economic development, which includes a reasonable fiscal and regulatory climate; and just as important, a supportive emotional climate where people can find that safe space, find their mission, and believe they can achieve it." He added that the number of such innovation communities has been increasing, with 1871 and the KIN as examples. Traditionally, universities hold study sessions on entrepreneurship and economic development, but they are only beginning to understand the need for convening the people who create ongoing community.
From page 90...
... Making those connections are so critical in each stage of the rapid development of a company, whether the task is to apply for a SBIR, or even just to sit down and chat about how to start a company." He said that another critical element of the institute is that the director of operations, Sheila Judge, has a PhD in biochemistry and is able to work directly with faculty to put together team-based science grants and facilitate connections between areas as diverse as materials science, endocrinology, and synthetic chemistry. "All those people need each other," he said, "but don't necessarily speak the same language." Much of the impetus to build the institute, he said, came from former Provost Lawrence Dumas, who worked hard to encouraged interdisciplinary research and build a better environment for students to begin new types of companies.
From page 91...
... "We are working at many levels to stimulate new types of partnerships and facilitate the recruitment of entrepreneurial faculty, particularly ones who have a talent at directing research teams to go where no one has gone before in experimental science." He described a joint grant proposal the CLP created when Dr. Lee's program at the National Cancer Institute reached out to the physical sciences community, including mathematicians, modelers, and engineers, to invite a new perspective to the study of cancer.
From page 92...
... Woodruff began with a description of the "epidemic of obesity and diabetes" which in Illinois has generated a "disproportionately unhealthy population." She also said that "silent killers," including infectious diseases, "put us on a par with many developing nations," and that patients suffer an uneven distribution of care. At the same time, she said, "we have a tremendous potential to think through these problems and put in place heath care management programs for women and men living in our state." Beyond these better-known handicaps, she said, is a less familiar health problem that stems from significant differences in health factors and overall biology between the male and female sexes.
From page 93...
... In fact, she said, it would cost less to examine the gender differences early in clinical development than examining them later -- when it was discovered that half the population does not respond to a particular drug, for example. She said that despite a mandate set in 2004 that principal investigators on NIH grants address the issue of inclusion, 64 percent of studies still do not report any outcome by sex.
From page 94...
... We also coined the term oncofertility, which happened on Christmas Eve with my family, because we agreed that those two words -- oncology and fertility -- belong together in one word, not separated even by a hyphen." Thus was born the Oncofertility Consortium, based at Northwestern, which has the 38 She cited a booklet authored by Lance Armstrong on testicular cancer entitled "Families After Cancer: A Discussion with Cancer Survivors and Fertility Experts."
From page 95...
... "When institutions are paying for conferences and interdisciplinary programs, it suggests that these programs are generating value." He said that he and Dr. Michael Lippitz, his collaborator on the Innovation Communities research, had counted the formation of more than 35 new groups worldwide in the past few years ."So we're seeing emergent models, and some are generating outcomes, such as commercialization and business deals." Dr.
From page 96...
... A problem was many scientific organizations pushed back against that mechanism, fearing that big science would take over from RO1-level science. In fact, she said, the program offered many types of grants, most of which were RO1s, and "the ordinary researchers connected in ways we wouldn't have had otherwise.
From page 97...
... He proposed that because value is added through interdisciplinary work, universities would profit by hiring a full-time member to find and fund faculty who do the best interdisciplinary research. This broader structure, he added, must be accompanies by an adjustment of student funding to allow graduate students to shift their "laser focus" on one research topic to broader exposure to related topics.
From page 98...
... It's time for that to happen." Dr. Testa closed the panel by suggesting that in place of a general call for funding, the innovation ecosystem could best benefit from a prioritized list of what needs to be done, along with the organizational changes required.


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