The Business of Partnerships

Business leaders, educators, government officials, and technology experts are forging partnerships to advance their city and curb communication "turf wars" that have halted past development. Now, college professors are lugging their lesson books into the corporate trenches, techies are educating locals about e-commerce, and community alliances are cutting across divisions and advancing a shared vision that will help New Orleans get down to business.

[Jim Clinton]
Partnerships are necessary for success. The Southern Technology Council is a component of the Growth Policies Board and we're working on a project called, "Seeing the Future," which address the necessity of partnerships when mapping the new economy and preparing people to thrive in it. It's amazing how most solutions are realized through partnerships. They turn out to be creative ways of pooling people, resources, organizations, institutions and governments together for the greater benefit with out creating a big bureaucracy in the process.

The Louisiana Partnership for Technology and Innovation has contributed to the community by encouraging conversations about growth, studying opportunities, and working to understand the impact of a strong research program on community businesses. We bring together resources from the academic sector, the political sector, and the private sector in an effort to reinvigorate and diversify the Louisiana economy. We focus on startups and early-stage opportunities that emerge from the private or academic sectors.

Universities are obviously important everywhere, but in a state like Louisiana, the research universities become crucial because we lack a strong private-sector research component. Therefore, Louisiana is forced to rely even more on the technology capacity built into local universities. Thankfully, several chief university executives are forward thinking. They're not as inclined to slip into the silo syndrome, stifling development because they are only interested in what's going on within their walls. The Louisiana Partnership for Technology and Innovation has always tried to build bridges between the academic community and the private sector. But now several universities are forging partnerships on their own, and more people than ever are inclined to push in a team-oriented direction.

On the education front, for example, Tulane and LSU medical schools are starting to cooperate by looking for opportunities to collaborate. They've spent the last 18 months or so putting together a major gene therapy initiative, which the state has spent upwards of $4 million to get off the ground. So Louisiana is breaking ground in a major 21st Century field that historically has not been associated with the state. Regions where institutions start to behave cooperatively have a chance to go somewhere. We usually tear ourselves down by refusing to join hands and figuring out how to take advantage of potentially joint capacities.

[Tim Ryan]
We're not Austin, Texas and we're not the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina. But we have started to put in a research development and technology park right across the street from the University of New Orleans campus. The Naval Information Technology Center is physically located in that technology park. We're forming partnerships among individual businesses, the Navy themselves, the consultants to the Navy, and the university. We are also trying to develop a series of projects, such as internships that will allow students to work in a technology-related job and actually receive course credit.

We also are recruiting members of the business community to teach some of our courses. They give the students a practical, applied understanding of how things work in the real world. We develop relationships with individual businesses and have some of their professionals work with our faculty as well. We're also encouraging faculty to interact with businesses in a consulting capacity that will be mutually beneficial to the university and the business. Along similar lines, we're developing faculty internships. Instead of teaching a summer course, faculty members work for a local business to gain hands-on, practical understanding. Simply put, faculty members who have been out of school for awhile don't have current business experience because they've been teaching. This internship is an example of a strong partnership that will help businesses, the students, and faculty members thrive in the new economy.