The Smartest Places on Earth
Page 10
Little by little, and then by leaps and bounds, northeast Ohio came back. Today, this brainbelt is one of the top five industrial markets in the United States, home to 10,000 manufacturing companies (one-fourth of them exporters) and a workforce of 3.9 million people. Proenza was instrumental in getting the ball rolling, but what saved the region from its death sentence was sharing brainpower—among businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies—and building on a singular and valuable expertise that remained. That expertise was polymer science.
And, just as deep research in one discipline tends to push forward the scope of inquiry (as we saw in Albany, where the work on nanotechnology is pushing toward new achievements in semiconductors), Akron’s work in polymers has broadened out into the wide-open field of new materials that consist of many types of molecules and take many forms, including fibers, composites, coatings, powders, liquids, films, crystals, and plastics. These new synthetic materials will transform products and open up a wide variety of applications from paints to medical devices to aerospace components. The creation of these new materials goes hand in hand with discoveries in advanced research and new manufacturing methods, particularly 3D printing.
University of Akron Polymer Center.
Credit: Kevin Quinn
In this chapter, we’ll visit four brainbelts that are involved in materials research in different ways. Akron, the polymer capital of the United States, has a particular concentration on materials for power generation systems, medical applications, and anticorrosion coatings for steel. In the North Carolina Research Triangle brainbelt, the materials activity intertwines with another of the three major areas of activity we studied: life sciences. There, new materials are being developed for application in sophisticated textiles, more efficient energy sources, and nanomedicine—the fabrication of materials to be used in vaccines and therapeutics for the treatment and prevention of disease. The Lund-Malmö area of southern Sweden was propelled into materials research after its premier corporate resident, Ericsson, the mobile telephony pioneer, went out of business. Its path was quite different from that of the others, however, because it chose to focus on a facility (as Kaloyeros did in Albany), the Max IV particle accelerator, Sweden’s biggest and most ambitious research initiative, which will enable researchers to study the properties and interactions of materials, gases, surfaces, and biological substances as never before. And we’ll also visit the European equivalent of Akron, eastern Holland. What Ohio is to the American polymer market, the Netherlands is to Europe. But just as Akron built its reputation on the basis of its long history and knowledge of making rubber tires, the Dutch expertise on new materials was built on its long-term research experience in aviation and the chemical expertise that was built up in the postwar period by companies such as Shell, Akzo, DSM, and Dow Chemical.
As we’ll see, smart new materials will be increasingly ubiquitous in our daily lives. The clothing we wear, our cars and aircraft, the medical procedures we undergo to replace joints and receive implants—and even the art we create—all will be transformed by brainsharing partnerships based in these former capitals of rubber and steel.
The Northeast Ohio Brainbelt: Creating Akron’s Polymer Valley
Northeast Ohio is a quintessential rustbelt turned brainbelt, and one of the most telling symbols of its story is the Quaker Oats building in downtown Akron. For years, the thriving company stored oats, ready for shipment by rail throughout the country, in the huge silo complex there. After the industry left the region and the facility fell into disrepair in the 1970s, real estate developers turned it into a hotel. This is where we stayed during our visit, just before the silo was reinvented once more as a residence hall for students at the University of Akron. But there it stands, not only as a visible reminder of the past but also as a marker of the future: the Quaker Square complex today houses shops, restaurants, offices, and apartments, and bustles with street life.
Like Albany, a university played a major role in awakening the sleeping beauty of Akron, but Luis Proenza thought about the role of his institution more broadly than did Alain Kaloyeros, who was focused on the SUNY Poly NanoTech Complex. When Proenza came to the University of Akron in 1999, he vowed the institution would be a major force in reshaping the region and wasted little time in developing a written plan he called the “Akron Model: The University as an Engine for Economic Growth.”2 In it, he argued that a university should not be an ivory tower but rather an open source of knowledge and a connector among the public and private entities and that it should, and could, drive growth for the region it served. The university was well positioned to play this role, and materials research was a natural fit: the university had been a leader in polymer research for years and trained thousands of scientists and engineers. Many of them had gone on to staff the research labs of the big tire companies. Because the labs were so deep in talent and so rich in expertise, the companies had not shut them down when they relocated their manufacturing operations. So the Akron area, Proenza knew, had a tremendous knowledge base, and much of that knowledge pertained to the materials involved in tire making: rubber, synthetics, steel. All that was needed was to reawaken and repurpose the knowledge asset, by applying it to marketable products that were urgently needed in the twenty-first century.
Today, the College of Engineering and the separate College of Polymer Science and Engineering at the University of Akron, with a combined 120 faculty members and over seven hundred graduate and postdoctoral students, has grown into the nation’s largest academic program devoted to the study of polymers and is acknowledged as one of the world’s most important concentrations of polymer expertise. Researchers at the two colleges are working on advanced materials that include high-temperature ceramics, composites, and novel metal alloys. These are transforming the auto industry, and the aerospace and defense industries as well.
However, when Proenza described the Akron Model as being university-centric, he did not mean that the university must control or lead all initiatives, only that activity and initiatives would radiate out from and around the university and that a quest for knowledge would always be involved.
Further, Proenza did not suggest that university-centric activities always center on the University of Akron itself. Kent State University, also based near Akron, has its own programs for polymer research. Its Glenn H. Brown Liquid Crystal Institute is named after the inventor of the liquid crystal display (LCD) and is the birthplace of this now-ubiquitous material, which is increasingly used in advanced materials and sensors. At Ohio State University (OSU), based 150 miles to the west of Akron in Columbus, scientists are also deeply involved in polymer research, focusing on the link between polymers and nanotechnology.3 The Wright Center at OSU has brought together six educational institutions and over sixty corporate partners (including Goodyear, GE, Boeing, DuPont, Battelle, and Honda) and played a key role in creating several new companies.4
As the research in these initiatives began to bear fruit in the form of new knowledge, Proenza saw that another element was needed in the university-centric model: a bridge between academia and business. Researchers could not be expected to create breakthroughs in materials, openly share the knowledge with their corporate partners, and then stand by as the advances were turned into lucrative products in which they shared no gain. That smacked of the old days, when academics were forbidden from sullying their hands with commerce. Accordingly, Proenza created an independent research foundation, which provided a mechanism for professors at the state university to financially benefit from their inventions.
The state government, too, played a role in the realization of initiatives like the Akron Model. In 2002, Governor Bob Taft launched a project called Ohio’s Third Frontier, a $2.1 billion initiative to “create new technology-based products, companies, industries and jobs,”5 then the largest state effort of its kind in the United States. Third Frontier, which was renewed in 2010, provides funding to Ohio technology-based companies and helps con
nect them to universities and nonprofit research institutions.
With grants from Third Frontier, two professors at the University of Akron, Frank Harris and Stephen Cheng, founded Akron Polymer Systems. They hired twelve PhDs and many other scientists from Akron’s enormous pool of polymer talent. Their mission was to develop special films for flexible LCD screens for use in solar cells and medical and aerospace applications. Their research was licensed and generated $1 billion in sales over the years.6
Akron Polymer Systems is just one of a whole new generation of materials—focused start-ups that have risen from the ashes of the tire-manufacturing industry, thanks to the combination of Proenza’s visionary work, revitalized research initiatives, opportunities for commercial gain, and government support. Akron Surface Technologies (ASTI), for example, is a start-up formed through a collaboration between the $5 billion manufacturer Timken7 and the University of Akron. Timken moved some of its research labs onto the university campus to facilitate collaborative research that focuses on corrosion, sensors, and coatings. The arrangement combines open knowledge sharing with proprietary research. Timken retains certain commercial rights for the use of its knowledge in specific applications, such as bearings, while allowing others to apply the knowledge in other applications, such as biomedicine and aerospace.
But not all the commercial action is in start-ups and in the retained labs of the big tire companies. Other large and long-established companies with a presence in the area, such as Akron-based A. Schulman, which manufactures high-quality specialty plastics, saw that they, too, could benefit from the Akron Model. Although A. Schulman operates plants around the world—including in Mexico, Asia, and Europe—the company chose to build a new plastic-fabrication facility in Akron, precisely because of its university-centric environment. Joseph M. Gingo, A. Schulman’s chairman and CEO, said the company sees great value in “having one of the leading polymer research institutions in our own backyard.” The company engages interns from the University of Akron and hires many graduates to staff its facilities in Akron and around the world.8
According to George Haritos and Ajay Mahajan of the University of Akron’s College of Engineering, companies in Ohio have learned so much and are so committed to the sharing of brainpower, they now share their knowledge widely. They teach other companies how to measure and minimize pollution, use sensors to develop clean energy sources, and produce fuel-cell components from polymers.
As we mentioned earlier, one of the beneficiaries of this brainsharing is the steel industry. Akron has applied its expertise in polymers to create corrosion-resistant coatings for the region’s steel producers, so they can produce next-generation steel that has superior performance characteristics and that better resists rust as well as minimizes wear and tear in bearings, a little-known problem that some analysts estimate costs the US economy 1 percent of GDP each year.9
Tom Stimson, who was vice president of technology and operations at Timken when we spoke with him and who remains a passionate believer in collaborative innovation and brainsharing, told us about his company’s joint research with researchers at the University of Akron. The goal is to develop special polymer-based coatings for bearings that are 40 percent more resistant to wear and corrosion. The company invested $5 million to build the Timken Engineered Surfaces Laboratories (TESL), a joint venture with the University of Akron. The arrangement required eighteen months of often difficult negotiations to address intellectual property issues, but the resulting solution is becoming a national model for knowledge sharing.
Akron’s breakthroughs in this little-heralded field of anticorrosion coatings is important for a wide variety of industries, not just the automotive sector. Polymer-based coatings are used in everything from personal-care products such as hair spray and lipstick to antimicrobial surfaces for surgical devices. The University of Akron’s independent research foundation, which we mentioned earlier, is starting to unlock the huge commercial value of this research. Artificial stent producer Boston Scientific paid $5 million for access to the university’s work on coatings, and the US Department of Defense is also keenly interested in this area and has sponsored a program at the university to further develop anticorrosion coatings.
The Road Ahead: Realizing Northeast Ohio’s Unique Innovation Potential
“Ohio is still making things,” said Barbara Ewing, COO of the Youngstown Business Incubator. The companies that couldn’t make the transition from the old model to the new have been left behind, but the ones that could manage the change have grown smarter and found new paths to success. “People are more optimistic again,” Ewing remarked. “The sense that we can’t compete with the Chinese is gone.”10 This was confirmation of what the Chinese themselves had told us and reaffirmation of what we had heard in other brainbelts on our journey. In Albany, the NanoTech Complex and Global Foundries demonstrated that the edge in semiconductor research and production was not irretrievably lost to Asia; in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, a company like Cree Inc. was confident that constant innovation in the light-emitting diode (LED) meant that the future of lighting would not be in China; large firms like GE, Apple, and Caterpillar were bringing back some of their operations.
The result of this extraordinary fifteen-year period of activity in Akron, which began with Proenza’s articulation of the vision of the Akron Model, is that Ohio is today the acknowledged polymer capital of the United States. Ohio is the largest producer of polymer and rubber products of any state in the country, the second-largest producer of plastics, and polymer manufacturing is the state’s leading industry.11 Ohio is recognized as the global leader in the polymer and specialty chemical industry, with about 1,300 companies that employ over 88,000 people.
One of Akron’s greatest strengths is that it is keenly aware of how quickly a once-proud industrial area can find itself facing an existential crisis; equally important, university and city administrators have learned that, through brainsharing, such threats can be overcome and whole regions can be successfully transformed. Akron will likely never feel the sense of invulnerability and superiority it had when it was the world’s tire capital, and that is certainly a good thing in today’s ultracompetitive world. But people in Akron have also rid themselves of the self-doubt and risk aversion that became so prevalent after the automotive bubble burst. According to Proenza, Akron now employs more people in the many small polymer companies than the big tire companies did at the height of their dominance.
This is not only a reawakening, then, but a revitalization.
NRT: A Brainbelt Forms Around a Struggling Pioneer
As our aircraft approaches the Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina, we’re rewarded with a pastoral view of pine forests. But what really gets our attention is the built environment, especially the modern, sunlit terminal, with its soaring ceiling, that serves as a stunning gateway to the once-struggling towns that are evolving into hubs of knowledge creation in this area.
The North Carolina piedmont has evolved dramatically over half a century, in a story similar—but with distinct differences—to that of the other brainbelts we visited. During the 1950s, North Carolina was a mostly agricultural state and the third-poorest in the nation. It was the rural equivalent of an urban rustbelt state: textiles, tobacco, and furniture manufacturing were as critical to the Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill economy as steel, autos, and other heavy industries were to the Midwest. And like the economic mainstays farther north, these industries faced a challenging future and many had already begun to falter. State officials and businesspeople understood that without new sources of revenue, the region’s economic survival was at risk. “We were pretty much in a rut,” said William Little, a University of North Carolina chemistry professor.12
Little and others hit on a striking and novel concept: to create the first full-fledged science park in America. The proposed park would build on the strengths of the three major local universities—health care at Duke University in Dur
ham, education at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and materials and agriculture research at North Carolina State University in Raleigh—to establish a unified research community within a science-based economic zone. The intention was not to “throw away our traditional industries,” says Little, but instead to encourage more diversity.
Creating the Research Triangle Park was a monumental effort that required the involvement of the three universities, a succession of governors and other state officials, bankers, old-money investors, and corporations based in North Carolina and outside the state, as well as real estate developers. The park did not immediately spring up on the 7,000-acre site in Durham. “We were running a bluff game in the beginning,” recalled George Simpson, the first director of the Research Triangle Committee and widely acknowledged as the brain of the Triangle. With little more than a brochure in hand, featuring images of the three university towers to give it an appealing Ivy League aura, Simpson and his fellow advocates visited over two hundred companies to solicit their support and encourage their participation.13
The process of populating the park continued over the period of a decade. As it gained more tenants, its reputation grew, attracting the attention of some of America’s leading companies. An important breakthrough came in 1965, when IBM decided to build a plant in the RTP for production of its recently introduced System/360 mainframe computer. Big Blue, as IBM is known, had looked carefully for a new production location, and its requirements were stringent: strong universities; high quality of life; good working relations among government, academia, and business; an industrious workforce; and nonunionized labor. The Research Triangle offered it all, and IBM took the plunge. System/360 became a runaway success, at least in part due to IBM’s operations in North Carolina, and the success justified the investment that Fortune magazine14 had described as a “$5 billion gamble.” To some, risk taking may look like simple gambling, but IBM saw the potential in the RTP and made a smart bet—a move quite similar to the judicious bet GE made on Batesville a few decades later.