Science Market Update

If you're a business entrepreneur considering the University of Illinois' Research Park as a location for your start-up, you may stumble upon the micro-urban video above.  If you do, and the video does what it's supposed to, you'll want to relocate to the Champaign-Urbana area.  Because it is smart and innovative, fast-paced, young, brimming with movers and shakers, and your average commute time will be 14 minutes.

In fact, the Research Park and the micro-urban video are both efforts to link the university with the growing industrial research market that profits from its proximity to university resources and in turn offers job opportunities and tax revenues to the larger C-U community.

Universities have always been incubators for business development to some degree, and business parks that have sprung up in campus towns have been especially popular with start-ups.  What is new in the past decade is the development of research parks by the universities themselves, on university land, with clear links to the academic institution and even its business school.

Vice Chancellor for Research Joe G.N. Garcia had overall good news to announce in his Feb. 16, 2011 report on the state of research and funding at the University of Illinois, Chicago.  The most promising statistic is that UIC has turned a corner with regard to sponsored research funding: for the first time in five years, funding increased, from $347M to $412M for the fiscal year ending in 2010.  (The previous year had actually shown a decline.)