Brains and Bucks, Part 1: South Dakota as Community

[Part 1 of a series on Universities, Research, and Economic Development]

Part 1: South Dakota as Community
Part 2: Audience Statistics
Part 3: Hard Numbers
Part 4: Main Street
Part 5: The Ivory Tower

Dakota State University and the Lake Area Improvement Corporation hosted a forum on the role of universities in commercialization this afternoon on the DSU campus. 33 locals, including Madison's favorite blogger, listened to presentations from DSU President Douglas Knowlton and SDSU's President David Chicoine on what universities can and should to capitalize (quite literally) on their knowledge base and create wealth for their local communities.

"Local" in our context takes on a broader meaning than just revitalizing downtown Madison (a subject which did come up -- more in a moment!). When South Dakota's public universities take on the challenge of expanding research efforts and generating more publishable, patentable, and profitable knowledge to benefit the local economy, "local" expands to mean all of South Dakota. While the geography may make such a perspective seem daunting, thinking of the entire state as one local economy has some merit. Dr. Chicoine, an Elk Point native and SDSU graduate who worked for 30-plus years at the University of Illinois, observed that South Dakota is an easy place for professionals from different fields and communities to work together. He referred to a discussion he had recently with a forum participant in Watertown on the topic of universities and economic development. The Watertown resident asked how Watertown could benefit from university research when it doesn't have a university. Chicoine pointed out that SDSU is just 40 minutes away, and that researchers and entrepreneurs in suburban Chicago would love to have a land-grant university within such a short drive timewise. South Dakotans can quite practically cover distances in half or a third of the time our urban counterparts can. Chicoine thus concludes that we can practically broaden our concept of community to include other towns and their resources.

Dr. Knowlton, too, observed that South Dakota has a statewide sense of community unlike that found in other states. He noted that the six public university presidents regularly meet and discuss ways the different institutions can collaborate. Such interaction and collaboration -- like this very forum, with two university presidents side by side, discussing how their institutions can create jobs and wealth for the whole I-29 corridor, if not the whole state, not just Brookings or Madison -- is not the status quo in other states. That high-level interaction is an advantage for South Dakota, not to mention, said Dr. Knowlton, a reason he personally enjoys his job.

On the grand scale, South Dakota as community makes sense. In the Sunshine State, the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon collapse to the Couple-Three Degrees of Don Jorgenson ("Oh yah, my neighbor's brother golfs with him!"). Even living hours apart, our professors, entrepreneurs, reporters, legislators, bureaucrats, and bloggers interact statewide perhaps as much as comparable professional communities in St. Paul and St. Louis.

Dr. Chicoine said outright that our universities have to collaborate to make good things for the whole state. South Dakota just doesn't provide the revenue to support six universities pulling in competing directions. To carry out the economic development vision of Dr. Chicoine, Dr. Knowlton, and the Board of Regents charging them with this mission, South Dakota needs to think of itself, at least in the research and commercialization arenas, not as a bunch of separate communities competing against each other for meager resources but as one fair-sized city of 780,000 -- think Indianapolis, or San Francisco -- that just happens to be spread out over 70,000 square miles but has one common goal: more research, more jobs, more money.