Grand Valley State University is a rapidly growing state university, rising from obscurity to challenging Western Michigan University for the most dominant university in this part of the state.
So it makes sense that Grand Valley is getting much more serious about technology transfer, tech company spinouts and job creation.
Grand Valley was the first stop on Day Six of the Great Lakes IT Report's Fall Tech Tour 2009. I also visited the downtown Grand Rapids campus of Ferris State Unversity, where fascinating things are also happening.
My day began bright and early with Paul D. Plotkowski, Ph.D., Dean of the Padnos College of Engineering and Computing.
Plotkowski works in the gorgeous John C. Kennedy Hall, named after the founder of West Michigan's Autocam, in Grand Valley's downtown Grand Rapids campus, on either side of US-131 along the Grand River. Kennedy Hall's 53,000 square feet house electrical and computer engineering laboratories, offices, classrooms, specialty project spaces and more.
Grand Valley started offering engineering degrees in the late 1980s and added its first downtown building, the 30,000-square-foot Keller Engineering Laboratories, in 2000. The School of Engineering's programs are almost all downtown, while the School of Computing and most of its resources undregrad are still based in Grand Valley's original Allendale campus about 15 miles west of downtown.
Grand Valley now has 1,200 students in the programs, and all of them alternate academic semesters with co-op education or internships -- much like Plotkowski's former employer, Kettering University in Flint.
Grand Valley now offers bachelor of science in engineering degrees i mechanical, electrical, computer and product design and manufacturing engineering, along with an interdisciplinary engineering degree that allows a student to custom-design an area of interest.
At the Master's degree level, Grand Valley offers mechanical, electrical and computer, product design and manufacturing, and production operations engineering degrees.
In computing, Grand Valley offers computer science and information systems bachelor's degrees, and at the Master's level, computer information systems and medical and bioinformatics degrees.
Plotkowski says his part of the school works closely with Garnd Valley's two SmartZones -- the Michigan Alternative and Renewable Energy Center in Muskegon, and the West Michigan Science and Technology Initiative across downtown Grand Rapids in the Medical Mile area.
"The whole idea is to provide incubators to entrepreneurs, to provide support from concept to incubator space, all of the things that go in the product develoment and launch and corporate launch cycle that many entrepreneurs, inventors, businesses who want to take the next step don't have the sense for," Plotkowski said.
In fact, WMSTI has been designated as Grand Valley's intellectual property and tech transfer office.
I also met Tuesday with Linda Chamberlain, two years into her post as WMSTI executive director. This Ph.D. chemist, former automotve and chemical executive and business consultant looks right at home helping create new companies out of Grand Valley research and community entrepreneurial spirit.
A Grand Rapids native, Chamberlain proudly says that she got her degrees at Purdue, but "I got my education at Grand Rapids Community College," where she did her first two years of post-high-school education.
Chamberlain said the WMSTI expanded in April, nearly doubling its space to 27,000 square feet.
The orgnization made a strategic decision to push the medical device industry rather than pharmaceuticals, based on the much faster speed to market of medical devices.
"We've had 13 companies come through, and 11 are still successfully doing their business," Chamberlain said of the WMSTI incubator. Six companies have "graduated" and moved out of the incubator, four of which are still in the Grand Rapids area.
Chamberlain said Grand Valley is beefing up its research efforts. She said five faculty now have federally funded research projects under way at WMSTI, and she's looked over 30 invention disclosures across Grand Valley over the past three years.
Well, keep an eye on Grand Valley. They've exploded as an undergraduate educational institution, and based on that track record, if they say they're going to explode as a research institution, I wouldn't bet against them.
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From Grand Valley's downtown campus I headed up Heritage Hill to the building Ferris State University's downtown campus shares with Grand Rapids Community College -- the first-ever buiding shared betwen a community college and a four-year college when it opened in 1991.
I spoke first to James H. Jones, Jr. assistant professor of accountancy, finance and information systems, who offers "white hat" network penetration services to corporate and institutional computer networks.
His research specializes in botnets, networks of computers that have been taken over by viruses and do the bidding of the virus writer, mostly sending out spam e-mails. Most network operators, Jones said, have networks so complicated that they "don't really know what's on the network." Jones said he is filing for federal grant money to develop tools to detect botnets. He said that could lead to job creation.
"The easiest way to tell if you're part of the botnet is to look at network traffic," Jones said. "The idea is to look for anything that's not explained. Generally you would expect to see network traffic only if the browser is open. If the browser is not open, you would not expect to see outbound traffic to port 80." If you do, he said, that's a sign of botnet.
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I also spoke to Ron McKean, associate dean of Ferris State's College of Engineering Technology, who told me the university is hard at work planning its Third Annual Michigan Energy Conference, scheduled for April 7 and 8 in Big Rapids.
The school has also hired its first enregy coordinator, who wll manage Ferris State's energy work force training activities, manage the conference and seek grand funding. "As we build our presence in the energy arena, he wil be a key person on that," McKean said of the new coordinator, Arnold McIntyre.
McKean also said Ferris is close to adding a new bachelor's degree progarm in energy systems engineering. The degree will have a choice of three areas of concentration -- building energy systems, energy generation and distribution or alternative and renewable energy.
Thomas M. Crandell, director of corporate and professional development at Ferris, said the school is also working on a Green Awareness Program with the Union Associaton of Plumbers and Pipefitters, developing environmentally friendly training modules for their members, as well as a partnership with DTE Energy and Habitat for Humanity to research the energy efficiency of existing homes.
Ferris is also working on creating a West Michigan College Wind Collaborative with several community colleges, creating a program of wind energy education.
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Diane L. Nagelkirk, associate professor and department chair of architectural technology and facility mangement at Ferris, told me the school is planning to launch a bachelor of science program in architecture and sustainability, an outgrowth of Ferris' current two year associate degree in architectural technology.
Ferris also plans to create a Small Town Studio, a place in Big Rapids where the school can integrate its architectural techniques into "real life projects for small towns."
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I also met with Frederick 'Rick' Baker, coordinator-instructor-advisor of Ferris Digital Media Software Engineering program in downtown Grand Rapids.
He achieved the nearly impossible -- giving me a 20 minute presentation on his software development class without showing me one single line of code, or indeed telling me anything about how to develop software.
Instead, Baker gave me a tour of the recent rise of software-driven technological advances in appliances and handhelds. And he told me how he teaches his students about the real world of the software development industry, about the soft skills they'll need in human relations and making presentations, and how he teaches those skills in his class too.
All I can say is, I wish I'd had more professors like this guy.
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Ferris is also planning to add another high-tech program in molecular diagnostic technology, according to Elaine Staley, molecular diagnostics program coordinator at the College of Allied Health Sciences within Ferris, and Donald J. Green, vice chancellor and academic dean of Ferris Grand Rapids.
The program will train medical technologists to work on the lab in the latest genetic testing technologies -- which are growing rapidly as techniques to identify microorganisms, allowing faster diagnosis of diseases like MRSA.
Said Green: "At Ferris we try to look at trends nationwide, see where things are going. And with the human genome unlocked, that's 30,000 genes, the estimate is that 5 percent will have some value from a diagnostic standpoint. If there are 1,500 genes involved, that could wind up 1,500 different genetic tests available to doctors. We think adds up to a tremendous growth opportunity for the state of Michigan and for budding laboratory scientists."
Staley said that if the program is approved as currently proposed, students will spend three years studying science in Big Rapids, then do their senior year in Grand Rapids working with all the sophisticated medical offices, hospitals, clinics and institutes on the Medical Mile. Green said Ferris is also looking for partnerships with community colleges to feed into the program.
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My final visit of Tuesday was with David Baker, who runs Ferris' Digital Animation & Game Design program in Grand Rapids.
I visited Baker around five years ago when the program was just getting off the ground, and again last year. Baker said the program currently has 150 students, whcih represents a leveling off in recent years, "and that's a good thing. We don't want exponential growth because there's not exponential job growth."
To level off enrollment, Baker said the program has slightly boosted its GPA requirement and now also requires an entry portfolio.
The program is doing amazing work, Baker said.
"Students are working on projects that are going to be demos and pilots in Hollywood," Baker said.
But just as importantly, he said, a significant number of its graduates "have decided to open up their own shops in Web development and other new media enterprises. And the ones who are not going to the hotbeds are opening up here in West Michigan, and they are finding work, and that's exciting. The culture of this program is entrepreneurial."
Baker said the program is looking to expand overseas and is seeking more feeder ties with community colleges. It's also expanding virtually -- one of its original instructors has moved to Boston, but still teaches classes via telepresence.
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So what can I say about this visit? Well, it's not exactly like a lot of the others on the Fall Tour, where I'm introduced to a seemingly endless parade of actual spinoff companies based on university research. Both Grand Valley and Ferris State are new to that sort of thing.
But as I said of Grand Valley, Ferris State won't be new to it long. Expect more companies coming out of Big Rapids, just as you'll see out of Grand Rapids and Allendale.
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I also want to emphasize yet again how much I'm loving my GMC Yukon Hybrid truck, the official Tech Tour Mobile, courtesy of the La Fontaine Automotive Group. Twenty-some MPG out of a huge truck is simply amazing. If you need something big but also want to make it as efficient as possible look no further.
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Meanwhile, the Battle of the Broadbands continues. In Kalamazoo, the Holiday Inn West's Wi-Fi checked in at 880 kilobits per second download but 1.31 megabits per second up -- asynchronous in the opposite direction of what you usually find. Ping was a good 26 milliseconds.
Meanwhile, in this neck of the woods, new AT&T card achieved 630k down, 260k up, and 151 milliseconds ping, while old Sprint card got 650k down, 110k up and 330 ms ping.
All speed checks are as determined by www.speedtest.net.
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