A Push for More Business Ties

The long, mutually beneficial relationship between TI and Rice is unique, and the university wants to build more partnerships like it. The dividends: more research money, more exposure to real-world problems for students, and quicker job placement on graduation. Plus, there’s the satisfaction that Rice faculty and researchers feel when their work, like DSP, makes a major impact on society. The school is currently nurturing close relationships with a number of other major companies—Halliburton, Hewlett-Packard, National Instruments, Nokia, Schlumberger, and Shell Oil, among them. Rice also has well-established relations with NASA and the Texas Medical Center, where it’s engaged in more than 90 collaborative research projects.

C. Sidney Burrus, Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering

Rice, for at least the first 70 years of its history, did not seek close ties with business, or just about anyone else for that matter. Says Burrus, a Rice alum and a professor here for the past four decades, “We often had the attitude: ‘We don’t need you, and you don’t need us.’ We literally stayed behind the hedges.” Former president George Rupp—surprised by the lack of interaction between Rice and the outside world—began the process of opening Rice to more engagement with the local community, other universities, the arts, and industry.

Since his inauguration in October 1993, President Malcolm Gillis has taken the outreach effort much further, determined to prove that a relatively small university can play a leadership role out of all proportion to its size. Two of his initiatives have had major impacts on the technology community in Houston and, to a degree, in the state. He created the Office of Technology Transfer, designed to help commercialize a valuable, long-hidden asset at Rice—new discoveries and innovations by the school’s world-class scientists and engineers. He also signed off on the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, a program to spark the development of new technology companies in the Houston community. In just the past three years, Rice has assisted in the launch of 110 companies, a number of them engaged in the university’s key strengths: nanoscale science, information technology, biomedicine, and environmental science. The nanoscale science companies, pioneering the manipulation of molecules to fabricate fantastically tiny yet highly versatile creations, alone are on the verge of igniting entirely new business revolutions, just as DSP did. Rice is now in a position to be a catalyst for technology growth in Houston, a role Stanford played in Silicon Valley and MIT performed in Boston.