Education May 6, 2011 12:00:00 am

CAMT brings more to NoCo than ACE

By Joshua Zaffos

FORT COLLINS – Whether or not Loveland closes the deal to land an expansive, multimillion-dollar aerospace and clean-energy park, Northern Colorado will be getting a taste of the coming boom in research and technology advancement.

Colorado State University and the Colorado Association for Manufacturing and Technology announced an agreement in April to launch a Northern Colorado Manufacturing Extension Partnership Regional Office on the university campus. The initiative fits with the ongoing plans of CAMT and NASA to build the Aerospace and Clean Energy center that would bring together roughly 100 tech and research firms and provide thousands of jobs to the region.

Last December, CAMT and NASA signed the Space Act Agreement, which set plans in motion to build the ACE manufacturing and innovation park, where businesses will be able to tap technologies and concepts conceived through NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy. The former site of Agilent Technologies in southwest Loveland has emerged as the frontrunner to host the ACE park, but negotiations and evaluations are still under way.

Regardless of those talks, the April announcement signifies that CSU will have its own relationship with CAMT. The partnership should boost technology transfer and intellectual-property claims for university research, with a focus toward developing projects that could serve businesses operating within the ACE facilities. Cynthia Christie of CAMT has begun running the regional extension office on the Fort Collins campus, and initial talks are already leading to connections between CSU researchers and prospective businesses looking to be a part of the ACE center.

“As companies are exploring issues with CAMT, even in these early stages of the (ACE) center, we’re beginning to make linkages back to our faculty members here, and stimulating some discussion around these joint activities,´ said Bill Farland, CSU vice president for research. “The university has a rich pool of talent that we’d like to make available to some of these companies that are going to be working within the ACE center.”

Long-standing deal

The deal between CAMT and CSU actually predates this year’s hubbub over the location of the ACE park. The school and CAMT began discussing a partnership last year, recognizing CSU’s long-standing relationships with the local technology community, including previous connections with manufacturers’ groups and present involvement with regional business innovation clusters. Farland said the university participates in similar tech advancement efforts through the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, and other agreements.

“We feel like the relationship we have with CAMT is consistent with our focus on innovation and moving intellectual property from our campus out into the marketplace,” Farland said.

Both CSU and CAMT officials hope to build off the school’s existing programs and shepherd appropriate projects toward the businesses that emerge within the ACE park. CSU already explores technology transfer and commercialization of promising research through its research foundation and industry-focused superclusters, which support tech development for cancer research, clean energy, and infectious disease.

“With this formalized relationship, each of the organizations is looking at the technology that CSU has developed in-house and will help to match those up with manufacturers that can help take that technology to market in a quicker period of time,´ said Jo Ann Miabella Galvan, CAMT vice president of finance and administration.

CAMT is currently fielding interest from potential tenants for the ACE park, but one of the partnership’s first initiatives will be an “asset mapping” project, Galvan said, which will create a comprehensive database of all local companies along the supply chain for aerospace and clean energy industries. The asset mapping should be completed and available by the end of 2011, and it should identify research and innovation that can serve the companies and programs to be developed in the ACE park.

Intellectual, funding pipeline

While CSU and its researchers will be supporting ACE businesses, CSU expects to benefit from the intellectual pipeline – and funding streams – between the prospective companies and NASA and the Department of Energy. The Technology Acceleration Program, started through CAMT under the Space Act Agreement, is expected to make thousands of government technologies available to businesses and researchers. NASA is slated to have an “innovation” official at the ACE grounds to facilitate use and applications of agency tech concepts.

Tom Clark, executive vice president of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp., which has been working with CAMT on development of the ACE park, told the Upstate Colorado annual membership meeting last week that NASA has “14,000 inventions just lying on the shelf,” waiting to be commercialized by private industry. This could take the form of NASA receiving royalties from the patents once products come to market; some could be granted to private firms outright.

“The same model has been used in California, at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley,” he said. “There the focus is on IT development; here it will be on manufacturing. But that center eventually created about 6,000 jobs.”

Through the agreement with CAMT, CSU researchers should gain opportunities to serve as consultants on technical matters for businesses, leading to contract work, sponsored research and an increase for the school’s intellectual property options, according to Farland. The CSU administrator also anticipates that research programs based around NASA and DOE technologies could lead to spinoff companies that will establish themselves in Northern Colorado.

“In the long run, we think those relationships can lead to more public-private partnerships for sponsored research, which would be a benefit to us as well,” Farland said. “The relationship that we’re going to be building is going to allow the talents and innovation from CSU to continue to have an impact on the private sector and hopefully be in a position to assist in improving economic situations here in Colorado.”

“CAMT has the vision that activities in clean energy and space-related work are going to bring additional companies and jobs and ideas to Colorado,” he added. “We’re pleased to be, sort of, their go-to university as part of this.”