By Doug Ford/thereporter.com
Posted: 05/04/2012 01:06:09 AM PDT
Last week's Solano Economic
Development Corp. breakfast provided excellent food for thought for Solano
leaders. Sandy Person and her staff have been doing a truly great job. The
program on "Industry Clusters as Assets" featured keynote speaker Dr. Robert
Eyler, professor of economics at Sonoma State University. His talk complemented
all the good work that has been done through the economic summits and the Solano
Economic Index during the past few years.
Dr. Eyler described in general terms what we need to do, such as prepare a
complete list of our assets and develop answers to the questions he raised:
"What assets exist to support this industry and these companies? What assets are
missing and need to be found to support this industry and these companies?"
The first step is an asset inventory. Solano is fortunate in having life
sciences as its fastest-growing cluster. We have tremendous resources in the
University of California campus in Davis -- the most life science-oriented
campus in the UC system. One of the first things that Linda Katehi did after she
became chancellor was to appoint a blue ribbon committee to review technology
transfer and commercialization. An excellent presentation available on her
website is "The Role of Universities in Innovation."
So our primary asset is the tremendous brainpower we have in the university.
We need to become much better acquainted with all it has to offer.
At the center of our life sciences cluster, we have the
Genentech plant in Vacaville -- the largest pharmaceutical manufacturing
plant in the world and regularly rated as one of the best companies to work for
in the United States.
At Solano Community College, we have the first program created to train
workers for biotechnology manufacturing. In the Benicia, Fairfield-Suisun and
Vallejo unified school districts, we have high school academies in
biotechnology, in which students earn college credit while still in high school.
We have strong educational support for our life sciences cluster, but we have
plenty of room to improve.
To complete the work that needs to be done in collecting information about
our assets, organizing it to make it easily available to all who need it so we
can develop improvement plans will require more staff than Solano EDC now has.
In previous columns, I have briefly described the phenomenal growth of the
Singapore economy. It was made possible by the Singapore Economic Development
Board, which does for Singapore what the Solano EDC was created to do for Solano
County.
Singapore's "life sciences cluster is a growth industry that will be
developed as one of the key pillars of Singapore's manufacturing sector,"
according to BioSpace.com. "In 1999, the life
sciences sector grew by 60 percent in output to reach $6.3 billion with value
added jumping 75 percent to $5.2 billion."
Singapore, a nation one-quarter the size of Solano County and with enormous
handicaps, focused on creating a life science cluster after we have. Now they
are a prime competitor. We need to get busy!
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The author is retired from the U.S. Air Force, lives in Dixon and serves
on the Solano County Board of Education.
