Pacific Business News met recently with University of Hawaii at Manoa leadership to discuss the university’s strategic plan and its emphasis on workforce development (see here). As a follow-up, PBN met with UH’s Vice President for Research and Innovation, Vassilis Syrmos, who is tasked with leading systemwide research and innovation efforts as well as commercializing UH discoveries.
Syrmos sees numerous opportunities for Hawaii to grow new industries and strengthen its existing specialties such as tourism and oceanography. The UH system, he said, is looking at such areas as ocean conservation and land management, creative media, health sciences, nursing, senior living, senior care, mental health social work, geothermal energy, space technology and more.
“We are fortunate to have been funded by the state Legislature to have 10 positions to create a space engineering and advanced manufacturing center at UH-Hilo, which is in collaboration with the College of Engineering,” he said, as an example. “This is huge for astronomy and for the university.”
Here are highlights from that conversation.
On Hawaii’s persistent brain drain: We are making progress. When I first came here in ’91, I was a faculty member in electrical engineering, [and] from the graduating class in electrical engineering, 80% to 90% of our students would go to the Mainland, primarily the West Coast, for large defense contractors like the Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman. Now we see only 50%, or even 60% of students leaving this state.
On wealth creation via education: The university should not only be in the business of workforce creation and workforce development, but we should also be in the business of wealth creation. Usually, wealth creation is through new businesses, entrepreneurship, innovation. How do you bring that to every aspect of the curriculum? Every so often, we look at the general education curriculum and the question at some point will come: How do you infuse that curriculum with innovation and entrepreneurship ideas? We’re looking at some of these ideas right now of how we can try to convince faculty, who own the curriculum, [to do so].
On inviting the private sector into the university: One thing we’re starting, as of this summer, is to create a new class of professors. We’re calling them “professors of practice,” which means they’re not faculty members in the traditional way but are professionals from the business world or outside the university. They don’t have to have a Ph.D. It’s common in other, places. I don’t know why we didn’t do it before, but, we’re bringing professors of practice inside the university, and it’s good for faculty and students. For example, in other institutions like Stanford, Georgia Tech, these are [some of] the most well-attended classes and they close immediately once they [open for registration].
We’re looking at a couple of different industries. One is travel industry management. Then we’re looking at social sciences and engineering.
On the commercialization front, have you had any exciting developments in the last year or so? There are a couple companies we feel very proud of. One, Hohonu, does sensors, to monitor environmental conditions in the ocean. It can be deployed everywhere in the world. They have done extremely well, not only here in Hawaii, but now they’re all over the East Coast. The faculty member that leads that is Brian Glazer. They received funding both from the federal government and they raised their own venture funding. [Another company] is Jun Innovations, developing freezing techniques and refrigeration, so you can keep products longer. That one started as a company and then we have licensed the intellectual property to a pretty large Korean refrigeration company. Another is out of Pacific Disaster Center. They have their own software to monitor natural disasters across the world, called Disaster Aware. We have licensed that. We have good revenue out of these. And we’re looking to do more.
Is your revenue entirely from licensing, or do you also have ownership stake in any of these companies? We have ownership stakes in several of these companies. We funded over the last six, seven years, more than 30 or 40 startups. Out of those, 10 are surviving. Out of those 10, three or four are doing well.
Vassilis Syrmos
Vice president for research and innovation, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Address: 2425 Campus Road, Sinclair 10, Honolulu, HI 96822
Phone: 808-956-5006
Website: hawaii.edu
