Illustration by Heather Miller

Chain saws, baseball bats, truck bodies, jet engine parts and bridges. All from America’s industrial heartland, right? Or made in China? Wrong. Companies that produce these and other metal products — from kitchen knives and laboratory incubators to steel fabrication stock — employ thousands of Oregonians. One of the tools in their toolbox is a research partnership with Oregon State and Portland State universities.

Thanks to a program known as the Oregon Metals Initiative (OMI), companies from ATI Wah Chang in Albany to Precision Castparts Corporation in Portland have access to faculty and student talent to solve problems and explore product improvements. Engineers and students have teamed up to answer practical questions that production line workers and managers face daily in their drive to stay ahead of the competition.

“We are an industrial engine for the state,” says John Parmigiani, OSU mechanical engineer and representative to the 10-member OMI Board of Directors. “Historically, there’s been an emphasis on metallurgy, developing alloys for specific applications. But the OMI allows for much broader investigations, and we’ve expanded the research to other areas.”

According to OMI annual reports, among those topics are optimal job tracking systems, safer chain saws, improved pruning blades for home gardeners and the use of high-strength composite materials to reduce vehicle weight. Other projects have focused on self-cleaning chemical processing tanks, more efficient metal grinding operations and new materials for electronic systems. Some projects have resulted in patents for companies, internships for students and full-time jobs for graduates.

In all cases, teams of business employees and university researchers match wits and skills in improving operations and developing products.

Participating companies have included

• In Hillsboro, DeMarini Sports (athletic equipment, include aluminum bats)
• In Portland, Blount Manufacturing (chainsaws); and Daimler Trucks North America; ESCO Corporation of Portland (precision components for aerospace, energy and turbocharger markets)
• In Gresham, The Boeing Company (aircraft parts)
• In McMinnville, Cascade Steel (specialty products made from recycled scrap metal)
• In Oregon City, Benchmade (knives)
• In Cornelius, Sheldon Manufacturing (laboratory ovens and incubators) and Advanced Surfaces and Processes (extended wear surfaces for durability)
• In Corvallis, Hewlett Packard (electronics products including printers and computers)
• In Albany, ATI Wah Chang (specialty metal products for chemical processing, energy and other markets)
• In Reedsport, American Bridge Manufacturing (bridges and other civil infrastructure)

The State Legislature created the program in 1990. Projects are financed by state funds and matching dollars from businesses.

According to a 1998 survey of the state’s metals industry, Oregon hosted more than 1,700 metals manufacturing companies accounting for more than 55,000 jobs. These five recent projects are among those that are helping to shape the Oregon economy.

Company: Daimler Trucks North America, Portland

Project: Effective composites to replace metals
Goal: Reduce vehicle weight to create more fuel-efficient trucks and tractors

Company: Sheldon Manufacturing, Cornelius
Project: Humidity and Temperature Control of Thermal Chambers
Goal: Add features to an incubator and vacuum oven

Company: Hewlett Packard, Corvallis
Project: Materials for high-performance actuator applications
Goal: Develop thin-film piezoelectric material (exerts a force by changing shape in response to an electric current)

Company: Benchmade, Oregon City
Project: Blade steel alloy formation
Goal: Determine how different metal alloys perform in cutting experiments

Company: Blount Manufacturing, Portland
Project: Self-contained cutting-fluid system for concrete- and metal-cutting chain saws
Goal: Increase saw portability by designing an internal bar lubrication and cooling system

Brian Wall, Office of Commercialization and Corporate Development

With a research enterprise of more than $275 million and a history of successful partnerships with industry, Oregon State University helps companies from discovery through commercialization to solve complex research issues and develop innovative new technologies. OSU research is driven by the university’s commitment to sustain healthy ecosystems, a healthy economy and healthy people.

The OSU research community through the years has valued collaboration and an entrepreneurial spirit. Leadership plans to reinforce its support of innovative organizational structures that enable a diverse portfolio of both individual and team-based research. It includes a healthy spectrum of fundamental and applied research. Undergraduate and graduate education will continue to develop leaders and sustain a work force that meets current and anticipated employment needs.

OSU’s Vice President for Research Rick Spinrad is working with a team to develop a comprehensive Research Agenda. Defining the university’s research values and principles, thrusts, and implementation plans, the plan demonstrates that support of commercialization and corporate development are increasingly integral to the future contributions of the state’s land grant institution.

The diverse OSU research portfolio has grown dramatically – for instance, OSU industrial research agreements have risen by 57% over the past three years. In addition, OSU start-ups are fueling the Oregon economy. In the past five years, eight start-up companies were created, based on licensed OSU intellectual property. These eight start-ups have attracted more than $95 million in investment capital and created more than 180 new jobs in the state. An additional six start-up companies are sponsoring OSU research projects using OSU facilities or equipment, employing current OSU students or in other ways benefiting from OSU resources. Nine additional companies are currently emerging from the use of OSU intellectual property.

With increasing innovations and commercial opportunities, the Research Office has been transforming operations to keep pace. OSU’s former Office of Technology Transfer is now the Office for Commercialization and Corporate Development (OCCD), directed by Brian Wall. Focusing on connecting entrepreneurs, investors and existing companies to OSU’s capabilities, and helping transform research into applications that impact the world, the OCCD is the bridge between researchers and commercial entities, from Oregon-based start-ups to large international companies.

The newest member of the OCCD team, Dan Whitaker, a “serial entrepreneur” with experience in 16 start-up companies, is working throughout OSU to guide new business creation and corporate development. The result will be a substantial increase in start-up activity and connections with existing companies.

Safer, greener wood products are on the horizon thanks to a novel research partnership funded by the National Science Foundation. Backed by a five-year NSF grant, Oregon State University and Virginia Tech will collaborate with a veritable who’s-who of private wood-products companies to design a new generation of environmentally friendly wood-based composite materials. Weyerhauser, Jeld-Wen and six other leading companies are kicking in $30,000 each.

With matching funds from Oregon BEST (Built Environment and Sustainable Technologies), the new Industry/University Cooperative Research Center will have total support of $2.2 million to investigate new generations of adhesives, plywood and other materials for building homes, offices, schools and other spaces where people live and work.

“OSU and Virginia Tech are both international leaders in wood science and technology,” notes Fred Kamke, a wood sciences professor who will direct the new center at OSU. “This major new initiative will build on those strengths. Composite products allow for more efficient, sophisticated and competitive uses of wood, and they’re the future of the wood products industry.”

Microtechnology research by Goran Jovanovic, Oregon State University professor of chemical engineering, has contributed to new health-care and energy products.

Venture capital firms, too, have been bullish on OSU-originated firms. Home Dialysis Plus and Azuray Technologies, for example, received investments of $55 million during the first half of 2010 alone.

Since 1982, Oregon State has spun out 23 companies. Four or five more startups are in the pipeline for the coming year, says Brian Wall, director of OSU’s office of technology transfer.

“We’re at a point where we’re analyzing the technology to be sure it doesn’t need significant R&D investment,” Wall told Business Journal Web editor Suzanne Stevens. “Then we’ll help make introductions to potential investors and CEOs.”

Forestry

Engineering

Microbiology

Chemistry and chemical engineering

Veterinary medicine

As a volunteer with the nonprofit Business Enterprise Center in Corvallis, Plotkin had helped startup companies get their feet on the ground. And he knew that OSU’s Office of Technology Transfer works with scientists and engineers to commercialize their research results. So he contacted then-director Craig Sheward, who arranged for Plotkin to meet Les Fuchigami, an emeritus professor of horticulture and an expert in plant stress physiology. With OSU electrical engineer Tom Plant and graduate students in horticulture and engineering, Fuchigami had worked for nearly 10 years to develop a new way to monitor growing crops with speed and precision. Better information about plant stress could help farmers, as well as orchard and nursery managers, improve crop quality and save money.

Today, Plotkin and Fuchigami are chief executive officer and chief technology officer respectively of Precision Plant Systems Inc., along with Dave Persohn, chief financial officer, and Ping Hai Ding, chief scientist. They founded the Corvallis company to develop a hand-held device based on the OSU team’s work. Called the Ping Meter, it uses near-infrared light to monitor nitrogen and chlorophyll in leaves.

Combined with the meter’s GPS-based mapping capability and plant species databases, these indicators can empower growers in managing their crops, says Plotkin.

Ping Meter? The name plays on the idea that radar, sonar and other monitoring methods “ping” objects and return an echo that can be displayed and analyzed.

And it honors work by OSU graduate Ding whose statistical analyses of near-infrared light experiments played an important part in making the meter possible. With a Patent Cooperation Treaty application in hand, OSU is completing a licensing agreement with the company.

Seedbed for Growth

If final patent protection is granted, the science and engineering behind the Ping Meter will add to the 181 OSU innovations that have been patented since 1980 in agriculture, wood science, engineering, chemistry, microbiology and veterinary medicine. Some have reached the marketplace, and others require additional research. But as a group, they represent a seedbed of potential products, a growing resource for established corporations and startup entrepreneurs like Plotkin. And new opportunities are emerging. Last fall, they included an environmentally friendly polymer invented by undergraduates working with chemical engineer David Hackleman and a disease-resistant Port Orford Cedar rootstock developed by plant pathologist Everett Hansen (under development by Monrovia, the world’s largest wholesale nursery).

Such innovative technologies will drive future economic development, says John Cassady, OSU vice president for research.

Companies are increasingly looking to universities to provide the science behind new products. Moreover, state governments from Georgia to Oregon are pursuing economic development by investing in partnerships that bring top-notch experts together across the academic and corporate landscape.

Oregon has three such initiatives in nanoscience, sustainable technologies and drug discovery. All focus on translational research, the application of lab results to circumstances that are relevant to the marketplace.

“The states are seeing there’s potential to drive their economies through universities,” says Cassady. “You have to be proactive in trying to move through the translational stages to the point where it has an impact on the economy.”

Pressure on states to attract jobs has been growing for decades, notes a recent report by the Pew Center for the States and the National Governors Association, but global competition is raising the stakes: “States must accelerate their efforts or risk becoming economic backwaters. Specifically, they must become places where new ideas are discovered, invented or given their first big break.” (Investing in Innovation, 2007)

To generate more ideas that lead to products like non-toxic wood adhesives, disease-resistant crops and the Ping Meter, Cassady wants to expand collaboration between OSU, other universities and the private sector. He has created a university/ industry partnership committee, which, with the help of pharmaceutical-executive-turned-consultant John MacDonald of Massachusetts, is surveying technology transfer officers and corporate executives about effective partnerships.

“Universities are starting more and more to build these clusters of innovation and be recognized on a global scale,” says MacDonald. “At the same time, industry is seeing the relationship divide in such a way that the early discovery process is going to reside at the university, and the development and commercialization are going to evolve on the company side.”

With a history of partnering through the OSU Extension Service, agricultural experiment stations and other units, land grant universities are in a strong position to foster such partnerships, he adds. “They need to be proactive in their relationships, develop clusters of innovation that are going to solve problems and meet needs, generate the return on investment that industry is looking for. Partnering has to become part of the DNA of OSU.”

More Than Technology

Such relationships depend on discoveries that come to light through confidential “invention disclosures,” a description of an idea or technology. Brian Wall, interim director of OSU’s Office of Technology Transfer, says his office now receives 60 to 70 disclosures annually. Based on market analysis, patent potential and additional research by the inventor, Wall will typically apply for provisional patent protection on half of them.

It can take up to five years and cost $15,000 to $40,000 to secure a decision from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Multiply the numbers, and risk for the patent applicant mounts. For universities that bet on multiple inventions, payback can come through license fees or an equity stake in just one blockbuster technology.

In 2007, OSU received $2.5 million in licensing revenues and $100,000 in a sale of stock in Clear Shape Technologies, a Silicon Valley firm.

Nevertheless, Wall and Cassady stress that institutional finances are not the only, or even the most important, consideration.

For them, graduates are OSU’s most significant contribution to economic development. “Most universities realize that one of the most important things we produce for these companies is talent.

It’s not just about research and development and intellectual property. It’s about students,” says Cassady.

“Students may join companies that aren’t based on OSU technologies,” adds Wall, “but they got their education here. Or they join small companies and build them.

Or they join Intel or HP down the road and build a whole new division.”

So the strategy in the Office of Research is multi-pronged, supporting students with research grants and assisting faculty at each stage of the process. For entrepreneurs like Larry Plotkin, education and technology together represent a mother lode for Oregon’s economic future.