By Peter Behr
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 24, 1998; Page D01

Think of Silicon Valley's building blocks and Stanford University comes immediately to mind. The links between New England's technology industry and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are equally obvious.

But no such industry-university connection supports the Washington area's bid to be a national center of technology, some of the region's leaders acknowledge.

The heads of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, George Mason University in Fairfax and the University of Maryland at College Park want to do something about that.

On March 27, they will stage a day-long briefing at College Park to explain some of their most advanced scientific research and teaching programs to the chief executives of major technology companies in the region.

The goal, says Johns Hopkins's president, William R. Brody, is to develop closer ties among the institutions that can help the region's technology companies grow and better educate future technology workers.

Symbolically, at least, the conference will be a rare demonstration of regional cooperation in a metropolitan area where the political divisions separating Northern Virginia, the District and Maryland often run deep, the university presidents said.

"It's a very important statement that three universities want to collaborate in this way and reach out to the private sector," added William E. Kirwan, president of the University of Maryland at College Park. "It signals a new attitude -- that we're not individual fiefdoms at war with one another."

In the future, it's possible to imagine a Virginia technology company hooking up with a researcher at Hopkins or College Park, or a Maryland company sending employees to George Mason, said Alan G. Merten, president of the Fairfax institution. And some day, the universities may cooperate in designing new courses that could be taught by shared faculty, Kirwan added, or degrees that could be earned by attending classes at the three universities.

The idea, Merten said, originated with Mario Morino, a Northern Virginia software pioneer who founded the Potomac Knowledgeway, a Reston-based nonprofit think tank and support group for technology entrepreneurs.

Morino said it is clear that Northern Virginia's technology leaders don't know much about Maryland's technology assets and vice versa. Academic researchers in one university know the companies in their own backyards but not much of what goes on in neighboring universities. And that's a problem for the region.

Part of the motivation was a marketing issue, Morino said -- a desire to call attention to the academic strengths in the region that are not well known elsewhere.

"There's a general belief that the research community in this region isn't as vibrant as it could be and that what we have isn't as well known," Merten said.

That is both a public relations problem and a competitive issue for the Washington area, said Robert Kahn, president of the Center for National Research Initiatives and one of the originators of the network that became the Internet.

The Washington region "has a few good schools, but it has no great schools, none of the first-tier schools," Kahn said in an interview last year. "That doesn't say we don't attract some of the best minds in the country," he added, but they are dispersed at various universities and federal labs that dot the region.

But at each of the universities, there are academics who are at the top of their fields, Maryland's Kirwan said.

"Obviously, Johns Hopkins is a world leader" in medicine and biotechnology," he said. Maryland's credentials in computer science, telecommunications and electrical engineering are nationally recognized, Kirwan said, and George Mason has strong technology policy and information technology programs.

"I do think we have complementary strengths," he said. "Working together we can be of enormous assistance to the region's development."

More university presidents will be included at future meetings, Merten said. "We just wanted to get this first stake in the ground," he said.

Kirwan will be present for the first session but is leaving College Park this summer to become president of Ohio State University. Many observers believe his move was influenced by frustration over the level of funding the Maryland university system receives from state legislators. Merten has raised the same issue with Virginia lawmakers.

With the competitive juices flowing strong between Maryland and Virginia, there may be some political risk for state-funded universities to be preaching cooperation, Kirwan said.

"It's dismaying to me," he said. "If we can begin to think more regionally -- and by that I mean embracing Northern Virginia, the District and the Baltimore-Washington corridor, then we can build the Silicon Valley of the information age in this region. That's not hyperbole.

"Unless we can get people to recognize the symbiotic strengths we have and the value that comes from cooperation across political jurisdictions, we won't realize our potential.

"I think the technology private sector understands that. I just hope our political leaders see the value of this."