News Notes: Innovation hubs

NSF is committing a total of $74 million over five years to create four new Engineering Research Centers (ERCs), the latest round of long-term university–industry collaborative networks. For the first time the Department of Energy is participating, by ponying up $18.5 million to share the costs of two of them.

Innovation has always been at the heart of ERCs, but the current generation of centers places more emphasis on partnerships with small firms, international collaborations, and cultural exchange. “Industry is not taking as many risks as it used to, so a lot of high-risk innovations are sitting idle and not moving into new commercial products,” says NSF’s Lynn Preston, who has been involved with ERCs from their inception more than 25 years ago. The newer centers, she says, are strengthening their commitment to innovation and commercialization.

According to a 2010 study, ERCs to date have spawned some 624 patents, 2097 patent and software licenses, and 142 spin-off companies with a total of 1452 employees. Among the many successful products highlighted in the study are prosthetic retinas, methods for reducing water use in the manufacture of integrated circuits, a tornado prediction system that outperforms current NOAA radars, and software to estimate the costs of earthquake damage.

Each ERC has multiple academic and industrial partners, including at least one from outside the US. This year’s NSF centers are for Re-inventing America’s Urban Water Infrastructure, led by Stanford University, and for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, led by the University of Washington. The current batch also includes the joint NSF–DOE centers for Ultra-wide-area Resilient Electric Energy Transmission Networks, led by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and for Quantum Energy and Sustainable Solar Technologies, led by Arizona State University.