THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, March 11, 1996 TAG: 9603090312
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Ted Evanoff
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
It's tempting to ask Gov. George F. Allen a simple question. What will Virginia do this year?
Last year, the state assembled an $85.6 million deal for Motorola's new computer chip plant near Richmond.
Hardly anyone blinked at the deal's cost. No wonder. Motorola has a future. Look at the 20-year projections: 5,000 workers; 25,000 spinoff jobs; $564 million in new tax revenue.
While Motorola was news in '95. the question remains: What will the state do this year in the way of $85.6 million economic development packages for Tidewater or Roanoke or Fredericksburg?
Of course, the answer is you take what comes. And there's nothing in sight to lift Tidewater's low wage base. Plants on the $85.6 million scale come along once a decade if you have luck.
That's not to say there's nothing the state can do. From Washington to Richmond to Hampton Roads, there are as many as 1,000 small and medium industrial and engineering companies.
Lots of engineers and technicians have business ideas. Hard to believe, but most small firms are too busy to do the research needed to get backshelf ideas, even good ones, to the assembly line. Which is where the state comes in.
Find 500 companies with good ideas, lend them an engineer, spread $85.6 million among them. Let them develop good ideas into products for manufacture in Virginia and sale around the world. That'd create new jobs and tax base.
Sound like something out of Disney's America?
Well, Virginia is already doing this at Old Dominion University's engineering school in Norfolk. Only it's doing it on such a meager scale, hardly anyone knows.
Not far from the old docks at Lamberts Point, in a part of Norfolk where the streets use numbers for names, is a warehouse and industrial district.
It looks faded and low rent, though the district houses a number of busy enterprises including ODU's Technology Applications Center.
The name rings of high tech, but it's as distant from the leading-edge labs as the stevedores working the nearby docks are distant from the starkly modern cranes at the container ship terminals.
Need to measure the soil porosity on the moon? Phone CIT, the state's Center for Innovative Technology, which pairs businesses with breakthroughs by the universities and federal labs.
Need to resolve something more down to earth - how to keep, say, mollusks from congregating on your water system intake pipe? Then hire the tech center.
It's like a teaching hospital. It applies everyday solutions to everyday problems, only the tech center uses engineers on the ODU faculty and hires them out for fees.
Virginia furnishes $300,000 a year through CIT plus $100,000 worth of services from ODU.
``We're still small. We use about 20 faculty. Not all the engineering faculty does the kind of projects we do. We have some theoreticians. We have some rocket scientists in our aerospace program. But they aren't the people we necessarily use in our projects,'' said Clair M. Dorsey, the industrial chemist who heads the tech center.
``In the last six months, we've had 21 projects,'' Dorsey said. ``I don't want to call it exponential growth. But there's definitely been a need. We'll probably approach CIT for more money.''
Bigger than Motorola, bigger than some nations, is General Electric Co. It makes so many things - wire, light bulbs, ovens, jet engines - it's easy to lose sight of its origins.
Before there was GE, there was Thomas Edison. He had the ideas. His labs tinkered until the ideas were ripe, then handed off to the factories. GE made a fan in 1894, a toaster in 1908, a waffle iron in 1915.
Today in Virginia, small firms have ideas. And CIT and ODU's tech center can help shape them. What's missing, though, are labs like Edison's.
Jim Cross, dean of ODU's engineering school, launched the tech center in the mid '80s. He explains it like this:
The tech center can engineer a solution for mollusks on the intake pipe. But if a company wants to sell the solution on the market, it has to make the design simple and reliable. That takes more time and money, which are both scarce for most small firms. Would economic development cash from the state help?
``There's no doubt in my mind it would,'' Cross said. ``I think the competitiveness of our region can be improved by a modest investment.'' < by CNB