Dean's message: The new research university

This fall we heard a number of industry luminaries, including Microsoft chair Bill Gates, HP’s Carly Fiorina, and Intel CEO Craig Barrett, echoing a similar warning: The U.S. will lose its place as world leader in technological innovation unless we ramp up funding and take a more serious approach to domestically based advanced research and development, the force that drives our long-term scientific and economic success.

The nation’s top research universities and associated national laboratories—with their culture of collaboration and out-of-the-box thinking—have become increasingly involved in the advanced R&D “ecosystem.” Their large-scale research facilities and stores of talented faculty and students make it possible for research to rise above boundaries between disciplines, between basic and applied science and engineering, and between academics and industry. Our basic research is use-inspired but freed from commercial pressures like fast-tracking to market and maximizing shareholder value.

The future of our domestic economy is becoming increasingly dependent on university-based advanced R&D. Corporate R&D investment—not just in technology but in a range of sectors—has declined steadily for the last three years. Federal research funding has made up some of the drop-off, but spending increases there have emphasized defense and homeland security. Now, 58 percent of companies with the highest R&D expenditures are based in Europe and Japan, with only 42 percent in North America, and many of those depend entirely on universities for their long-range R&D.

Exceptions to this trend include some of our own corporate partners in the Silicon Valley, like Intel and Microsoft, who are among the top 15 investors in R&D worldwide, according to MIT’s Technology Review. Sun Microsystems is making headlines, even drawing criticism from industry analysts, for its heavy expenditures in R&D. But far from frivolous, these forward-thinking corporate investors are collaborating with Berkeley to help support faculty research, fund student scholarships, and host major initiatives like CITRIS, which would be impossible to undertake in a commercial environment and much less rewarding for our students without the connection to the corporate world.

Research universities are providing what I like to call a regional “demilitarized zone” for advanced research. This rich resource and its increasingly critical role in our economic future must be acknowledged, nurtured, and funded, not only to empower our long-term technological preeminence, but also to plant our students—the technology leaders of the future—firmly in the context of a real world.

I welcome your thoughts at dean.forefront@coe.berkeley.edu.

A. Richard Newton
Dean, College of Engineering
Roy W. Carlson Professor of Engineering

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