Region's Universities Raise Their Tech IQ

The greatest untold story of the Washington region is the under-performance of the technology sector.

Given all the federal research institutions and universities in the region, the educated workforce, and the existing base of government technology contractors, this ought to be one of the hot technology clusters of the United States, if not the world. That it's not is largely a result of the absence of an entrepreneurial culture and the lack of a world-class research university, along with the fact that we've done pretty well without it.

There are, however, some things in the works that could unlock Washington's tech potential.

Just this week, five leading universities announced the creation of the Chesapeake Crescent Innovation Alliance, with the idea that by collaborating and sharing resources, they might be able to attract funding or engage in research that no one institution could do on its own.

The university alliance was the first concrete program of the Chesapeake Crescent Initiative, created earlier this year by business executives George Vradenburg and Herb Miller, along with the governors of Maryland and Virginia and the mayor of the District, all of whom were looking for ways to take a more regional approach to economic development. At this point, the ideas for university collaboration are still pretty vague: sharing information about the resources each university has; jointly applying for research grants from the government and industry; and pooling resources to license technology and broker connections among academic researchers, venture capitalists and major corporations.

But what's most significant is the makeup of the alliance:

· Johns Hopkins University, arguably one of the world's leading research universities, which, under President William Brody and new provost Kristina Johnson -- both successful as academics and entrepreneurs -- has been shedding its Baltimore-centric insularity and its academic distaste for commercializing research.

· George Washington University, whose new president, Stephen Knapp, the former provost at Hopkins, and chairman, financier Russ Ramsey, have big ambitions to raise the school's research profile and entrepreneurial quotient.

· The University of Maryland, which has world-class engineering and biotech programs scattered around various campuses but has never really had the kind of economic impact on the state that its combined research budget would suggest.