Amidst the gloomy drumbeat of jobs and business news and bruises, four economic experts traded ideas with a packed house of interested citizens and business leaders this week at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy.
Highlights from “Michigan’s Economy in 2009 and Beyond: A Panel Discussion of Economy Experts”:
But maybe we mean it this time about that diversification thing.
University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman was in Cleveland recently, touting universities’ new roles in the changing economy. Some of what she had to say…
Research universities excel at creating solutions for our future. At Michigan, by drawing upon our vast and unique strengths of education and innovation, and finding partners outside of our traditional academic comfort zones, we will be a beacon of progress for America of the 21st century…We should take great pride in knowing that the Great Lakes region is home to more of the world’s top-ranked universities than any comparable region on the globe. When Shanghai Jiao Tong University – one of China’s leading research universities – created a list of 100 best universities in the world, 20 of them were here in the Great Lakes states. That’s one in five world-class institutions in our backyard – more than in the Northeast with the likes of Harvard and MIT, and more than along the West Coast, with Berkeley and UCLA… And we are nurturing a campus culture of entrepreneurship, where we encourage faculty, staff and students to push the envelope with innovative ideas for the marketplace… This entrepreneurial spirit showed its power this past semester with a competition we called 1,000 Pitches. It was a campus-wide initiative we hoped would produce 1,000 new business proposals from students eager to share their ideas and discoveries. We were worried we would not receive one thousand ideas. But, in fact, we received 1,044 – hundreds upon hundreds of proposals for new businesses, inventions, and non-profit organizations, all pulled together in three months’ time and posted on YouTube. One student proposed using cell phone technology to design a system that translates sign language into speech, and vice versa. His innovation joined such diverse proposals as one that converts wastewater into biodiesel fuel, and another that designs low-cost surgical lamps that are reliable in operating rooms in developing countries. One Thousand Pitches was a fabulous, engaging demonstration of students’ creativity and potential to innovate – skills that will be paramount as they move on from Michigan. Our graduates – and there are nearly a half-million of them – are our best ambassadors, as they transfer the knowledge they gained on campus to communities around the globe… Academe is known for saying, “Publish or perish.” I say, “Partner or perish.”
Oh, and those thousand students with their thousand ideas? They held an entrepreneurship fair this week.
