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Bryan Ritchie, associate director, Office of Biobased Technologies

	Photo by G.L. Kohuth Bryan Ritchie

As Michigan’s bioeconomy develops and expands, entrepreneurs and established businesses making the transition to products made from renewable resources will play a vital role in bioeconomic growth. To ensure that these businesses have access to the full range of bioeconomy research and resources available at MSU, the Office of Biobased Technologies (OBT) named Bryan Ritchie associate director for external strategies on Oct. 1, 2007. Ritchie also is co-director of the Michigan Center for Innovation and Economic Prosperity and associate professor of international relations, James Madison College.

What is the mission of the Office of Biobased Technologies?

OBT was created to facilitate Michigan State’s role in the growth of the bioeconomy. This mission can be broken down into several areas:

First, MSU has world-renowned researchers in plant science, chemical engineering, supply chain management, public policy and other disciplines that are central to the bioeconomy. It is important to find ways to connect these people with each other and with external partners, such as firms, governments and other universities.

Second, OBT is working to facilitate commercialization of the science and technologies created by MSU researchers. The primary focus at present is cellulosic biofuels, which hold great promise to transform our lives in many ways. Cellulosics is the process of creating liquid fuels from plant and other materials. Since it uses the entire plant, it eliminates the “food vs. fuel” trade-off. It also will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce our dependency on foreign sources of oil and reinvigorate our local agricultural communities.

What do you think the public should know or learn about the bioeconomy?

Michigan is uniquely positioned to benefit from the development of a biofuels economy. We have the natural resources, manufacturing base and intellectual talent to develop this industry.

But to do so, we need to become more entrepreneurial as a society. We must invest in new technologies and processes. We must link this new industry with existing industries, such as automobiles, transportation and other advanced manufacturing, as well as with health care and new industries such as information technology.

Probably the biggest challenge is that the high-tech nature of this industry will add pressure to increase the skills of the local work force. We need to prepare ourselves to participate in this new industry by upgrading our skill levels.

You also are co-director (with Ross Emmett) of the Michigan Center for Economic Prosperity at James Madison College. How did the center get started and what is its mission?

Ross and I started the center as a place that would connect people and policies for the 21st century economy.
This new economy will demand ever-increasing knowledge, skills, risk taking and entrepreneurism. We saw three key areas:

• Increasing entrepreneurism as a component of the curriculum in every college in the university;

• Improving the ability of students and faculty to take their discoveries and bring them to market; and

• Creating pathways into the university to make it easy for firms and other organizations to tap into the talent of the university.

To begin the process of increasing entrepreneurial content in the curriculum, we started a research seminar in James Madison College in 2005 that takes seriously our broader definition of entrepreneurialism, which is the ability of students and faculty to direct their lives as an independent enterprise. We select 12 to 15 students from the college and give them a research question to pursue.

The first class addressed how to increase the number of high-tech startup firms in Michigan.

The second class considered how to encourage entrepreneurship in Michigan.

The current class is exploring ways the university can connect with the private sector to encourage growth of entrepreneurial enterprises.

These classes have presented their findings to university presidents, political leaders, heads of business and other community leaders. They have won competitive grants and have learned how to make policy research relevant to the community.

The other two areas are being addressed by a university-wide initiative to increase the entrepreneurial focus on campus.
A special task force that includes a representative from every college is working to evaluate models from other universities in an attempt to determine the best practices that MSU might emulate and/or modify. Universities traditionally have a two-fold mission: to discover knowledge (research) and then transfer that knowledge (teach).

To this we’d like to add a third component: creation. Creation is taking new knowledge and making it commercially useful.
Each of these three areas is important in and adds to the importance of the others.

What kinds of recommendations have come from the Michigan Futures in the Global Economy applied public policy research seminar?

Several key findings have emerged from the student research:

The first class found that most states were not doing enough to encourage high-tech startups, especially when compared to the fast growing countries outside the U.S.

To catch up, the class recommended four steps:

• Improve the connections between students and local firms;

• Create seed capital funding sources to get ideas over the “valley of death”;

• Create “one-stop” shops to reduce regulation and hurdles to starting companies;

• Make research parks more than real-estate ventures by connecting them to the intellectual agglomerations at the university.

The second class focused on seven specific industries. They found that government regulations and policies have not been entrepreneurially friendly. Government needs to reevaluate its role in economic development by creating institutions that are friendly to risk takers and investors.

The findings from both classes can be found at www.mciep.org.

For a podcast with Bryan Ritchie, go to: spartanpodcast.com/?p=336.