http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYhHWpoxI18
On July 22, forensic bioengineer and Spike TV’s Deadliest Warrior host, Dr. Geoff Desmoulin, shared some of his ideas with JoVE about the future of scientific research funding on our blog.
“Universities are now looking outside the ivory tower and typical public funding sources in order to keep labs moving forward, ” he said, “I believe you will see more and more universities collaborating with industry and operating like free enterprise … as resources to fund smaller, less specialized labs weaken.”
"It's interesting to think about all the opportunities in the economy right now in terms of where people think the next phase of jobs are coming from. The federal government has put a lot of investment upstream in the labs, the university incubators, the national labs, and they aren't necessarily seeing a return on that investment, because of that high capital drain, and because there is what they see as this commercialization gap in the tech transfer area."
In regards to Kodak, the emblematic and once massively successful photography giant, he’s right. Last Tuesday, the New York Times covered a story on Kodak’s plan to re-emerge from bankruptcy as a commercial imaging company. What they didn’t cover was Kodak’s second initiative: to share their incredible accumulation of research and manufacturing infrastructure with start-ups and other researchers who need it most.
The best part? The timing is miraculous. And it makes for quite a Kodak moment.
In the year of the research sequester, with increasing numbers of grant requests and federal resources stagnant, Kodak’s leveraging of assets and “heritage technologies,” as they say, to newcomers in the high-tech industry is incredibly significant. It’s helping to jump start small companies who don’t have a lot of capital get moving.
“[We are offering] our core set of technologies and opening it up to more of an open-innovation model — so that the start-up high-technologies coming out of the lab … don’t have to invest their next round of funding into a machine that is a huge capital investment, that they maybe don’t even have the workforce to operate,” says Kelly Mandarano,the communications director for Graphics, Entertainment & Commercial Film at Kodak.
Mandarano says that Kodak has converted many of its business parks nationwide into these types of start-up incubators. Today, Eastman Business Park, formerly the bustling 2,000 acre home of Kodak’s research and manufacturing business, has approximately 40 tenants on site, she says.
Companies are taking advantage of the opportunity in the exact way the Desmoulins predicted. The opportunity or collaboration provided by resource-rich companies like Kodak could hasten the advancement of new technologies, and help close what Mandarano calls a “commercialization gap.”