Brain powered

Colorado’s growing status as an innovation center could help jump-start and sustain the state’s economy in coming years, and state research universities and their federal research partners are a major part of that equation. Those schools — from Colorado State University to the University of Colorado system — already account for thousands of direct and indirect jobs, and pump billions of dollars a year into the state economy.

CU’s four campuses alone — CU-Boulder, CU Denver, Anschutz Medical Campus and CU Colorado Springs — contribute more than $6 billion a year to the state economy, through spending on goods and services. It is also one of the state’s largest employers with more than 26,000 jobs. The university system has spawned 114 companies since the mid-1990s, and 85 of the 91 companies still in business have operations in Colorado.

Colorado State University in Fort Collins contributes more than $5.2 billion to the economy and employs 7,000 people. Its tech transfer program is one of the most active in the state and has generated 20 of spinoff companies in the past five years.

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“Looking at the basics, when you’re a high-priced market surrounded by thousands of miles of nothing, you better be an innovation center or you’ll be a ghost town,” said Tom Clark, CEO of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp. “That innovation is driven by a concentration of scientists.”

Collaboration between higher education research institutes and local federally funded research laboratories — including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) lab and the National Renewal Energy Laboratory (NREL) — is key to expansion of the innovation economy, according to economic development experts.

This state is home to 24 federally funded labs, which are closely allied with local research universities. The labs accounted for more than 16,000 jobs, both direct and indirect, and contributed more than $1.5 billion to the Colorado economy in 2010 alone, according to CO-LABS Inc. CO-LABS is a Boulder-based nonprofit consortium of federal scientific labs, universities, businesses and other groups launched in 2007 to make Colorado a global leader in research and technology, and to help create businesses.

“The relationships between the research institutions of higher education and federal labs is a critical driver of … economic development and job growth across the state,” said Ken Lund, executive director of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT). “Federal funding, as it relates to research labs, is critical.”

Following are snapshots of research activities at major Colorado research universities.

Of space, renewable energy
and Nobel laureates

The University of Colorado Boulder is a Tier 1 research university, meaning it receives among the highest amounts of research funding, with projects in areas from space science and computing to engineering. It’s the only university in the Rocky Mountain West that belongs to the prestigious Association of American Universities, a group of 61 top public and private research universities in the U.S. and Canada.

CU-Boulder — whose location at the base of the Flatirons makes it one of this country’s most scenic campuses — received $359 million in research funding in fiscal 2011, or 45.4 percent of the total $790 million in funding received by the University of Colorado System. The bulk of the system research funding — 78 percent — comes from federal sources such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF).

Brian Lewandowski is a research associate in the Business Research Division at CU-Boulder’s Leeds School of Business who tracks the economic impact of academic and federal research in the state. “There are lots of benefits associated with the Colorado economy — technologies that are licensed by the university, companies spun out of universities and companies that want to be close to university research.”

CU-Boulder’s research component consists of more than 90 research centers, institutes and laboratories, and a faculty that includes four Nobel Prize winners. One of the Nobel laureates is chemist Tom Cech, who returned to the university in 2009 after serving as president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md.

Colorado companies that have spun off from CU-Boulder research include OPX Biotechnologies Inc. (OPXBIO) of Boulder, a clean-tech company that produces bio-based chemicals and fuels and has roughly 50 employees. Broomfield-based ARCA biopharma Inc., a university spinoff with some 20 employees, is developing genetically targeted therapies for the treatment of heart disease.

Taking the cure

Much of the University of Colorado Denver’s research focus is at its internationally renowned Anschutz Medical Campus, located on the former Fitzsimons Army post in Aurora. The school calls itself Colorado’s No. 1 research university, attracting the most research funding — at some $421 million — in the CU system for fiscal 2010-2011.

The economic impact of the AnschutzMedical Campus on the state includes more than $2 billion a year in direct campus expenditures. The campus employs more than 8,000 people directly and contributed to the creation of another 9,700 jobs. A growing player in technology transfer, it starts five to seven companies a year.

“The Anschutz/Fitzsimons campus is a real crown jewel for the entire state of Colorado,” Lund said.

The campus’ largely health-related research specialties include treatments and cures for cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and spinal cord injuries as well as biomedical engineering.

“Biomedical engineering is about the creation of new devices — from tiny pediatric heart pumps and ocular devices to prosthetics,” said Lilly Marks, vice president for health affairs at the University of Colorado and executive vice chancellor of the Anschutz campus. “New drugs, devices and therapies are percolating out of our basic research. The economic impact is huge; it starts new businesses.”

High tech, high impact

Colorado State University in Fort Collins is a top national research university, whose veterinary medicine and occupational therapy graduate programs were ranked among the best in the country in March 2012 by U.S. News and World Report.

CSU’s regional economist Martin Shields notes that the university expends more than $330 million a year for research without a medical school. “From a real basic perspective, that puts people to work,” he said.

It attracts more in-state students than any other public university in Colorado and it educates these students for roughly the same amount today, on an inflation-adjusted basis, as it cost 20 years ago.

Known for its renewable energy, medical and veterinary research, the university helped spawn companies such as Abound Solar, a maker of next-generation solar modules for generating electricity, and Heska Corp., a provider of advanced pet-care testing and specialty products. Both businesses are based in Loveland. “The poster child for technology transfer is Abound Solar, since it came out of CSU’s research,” said Clark.

More than mining

Located in Golden, the Colorado School of Mines is a global leader in advanced technology research, and its students, faculty and staff make a “significant economic and social impact” on the state, according to the university. The school has 95 patents. Companies created by Mines research include MicroPhage Inc. of Longmont, which develops technology for the treatment of bacterial infections, and Golden-based MetaFluidics Inc., a developer of portable cell-handling devices.

Mines research centers on traditional and renewable energy as well as the environment, but also space, biomedical and humanitarian engineering projects. (Humanitarian engineering involves improving the well-being of poor and otherwise underserved groups of people.) The school is famous for developing hydrate chemical compounds, including one used to unplug oil lines in the North Sea in the 1980s.

“We started off looking at traditional energy sources — mining and petroleum — but we also continue to look at alternative energies like solar and wind … We’ve been pushing our bio-strengths as well,” said Will Vaughan, Mines director of technology transfer.

The university received $46.7 million in research funding in fiscal 2011. Roughly a dozen federal agencies including the NSF and U.S. Department of Energy contributed more than half that money — $25.3 million — and private industry kicked in $13.1 million.