UALR magazine
Spring/Summer 2007 • Vol. 3 No. 1
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Ripple Effect Pays Off
By Joan I. Duffy
On a steamy July day last summer, a gaggle of sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students from central Arkansas schools huddled in clusters around odd-shaped vehicles made of Lego blocks with tiny antennae attached. For two weeks they played space explorer, imagining themselves as star ship commanders directing their extraterrestrial vehicles to roam about on the surface of make-believe “Planet H-99.”
Dr. Sean Geoghegan, assistant professor of computer sciences at UALR’s Donaghey College of Information Science and Systems Engineering, watched over the bright-eyed kids who organized themselves into crews and learned to write computer codes directing the little Lego cars around the hostile environment, setting up base camps, monitoring volcanoes, rescuing lost vehicles, and much more.
The goal: To get and keep students excited about robotics so they will take the high-level math and science classes in high school to be prepared for high tech courses in college.
A group of somewhat older students — post-graduates in applied science — surrounded UALR Research Professor Ganesh Kannarpady earlier this year, beaming with the excitement of kids on Christmas morning as he examined a microwave oven-sized gizmo.
The device — a sputterer, a shiny sphere with portals and thick arms extending from it — will allow Kannarpady and his students to deposit thin strips of molecules in their quest to build a tiny spectrometer.
Imagine a device that would “sniff out” the presence of explosive material before a terrorist boarded an airplane or detect nuclear material before a dirty bomb could be unloaded on an American dock.
But Kannarpady’s students riffed about more commercial — and fun — spin off possibilities for the research.
If they can build a device that sniffs odors, why can’t they build one that mimics them? Picture an advertisement featuring a picture of a mouth-watering slice of pizza. What if the savory aroma of a fresh out-of-the-oven pizza wafts out of that ad? Would Madison Avenue be interested?
The sixth graders and the graduate students are part of a statewide effort among educators, government leaders, and corporate citizens to create a pipeline of inquisitive, well-educated thinkersand dreamers to drive Arkansas’ 21st century knowledge-based economy.
Knowledge-based Economy
It is part of a strategy to build an economic cluster of information technology business and research activity in central Arkansas. UALR’s role is to provide the feedstock to fuel a cluster of ideas and innovations in an effort to raise the average per capita income for Arkansans to that of the national average by the year 2020. If the effort succeeds, the high-wage, knowledge-based economic activity will generate an additional $2.4 billion in annual state revenues without raising taxes.
Can it be done?
“We’re going to try,” said Gov. Mike Beebe, who completed his first legislative session as Arkansas’ chief executive this spring. But the key is education,from pre-school to post-doctoral research. His administration is taking a comprehensive approach to economic development.
It must be done, if Arkansas is to survive economically, according to the Milken Institute, a publicly supported independent think tank that in 2004 assessed technology and science assets of American states.
The report utilized a national State Technology and Science Index to measure a set of interrelated measures that, taken as a whole, creates an inventory of a state’s technology and science asset that are the hallmarks of knowledge-based economies. They include entrepreneurial capacity, risk capital infrastructure to convert research into commercially viable technology services and products, and human capital — what Milken identifies as “the most important intangible asset of a regional or state economy.”
Growing Arkansas
Enter The Arkansas Economic Acceleration Foundation, the non-profit effort of knowledge-based corporations and individuals dedicated to raise Arkansas’ ranking, particularly in the crucial area of growing human capital to people knowledge-based companies.
“Education is the key,” Beebe said. “The whole idea of a knowledge-based economic development activity has at its core an educated workforce — and not just knowledge-based industries. In today’s world, traditional manufacturing requires a significantly higher educational component.
“The tie between education — particularly higher education — and economic development has never been more pronounced than it is today. You cannot separate one from the other. They go hand in hand. Without an educated workforce and attention to education, your economic development activities and potential are almost nil. But without an economic development policy to go with it, all you are going to do is educate your people to go to another state. The two are inseparable.”
Earlier this year, Beebe hosted a meeting of the CEOs of top Arkansas companies — Lee Scott, Warren Stephens, Don Tyson, Hugh McDonald, Archie Schaefer, Charles Morgan, Claiborne Demming, Walter Hussman — business leaders committing themselves and their companies to accelerate Arkansas’ statewide development of such industries.
Accelerate Arkansas grew out of the state’s Task Force for the Creation of Knowledge-Based Jobs and leadership of the Arkansas Venture Forum to find out how the state can do a better job of recruiting knowledge-based companies.
“The task force’s conclusion? You can’t easily recruit these kinds of companies,” said economist John Ahlen, director of the Arkansas Science and Technology Authority. “These companies get started near sources of innovations, sources of talent production like universities, because companies need knowledge workers, and they need new ideas for products and services.”
Unlike manufacturing plants that can relocate for better logistics, cheaper labor, or more advantageous tax packages, uprooting knowledge-based companies takes them away from places where they already have relationships that supply them with brainpower.
So if Arkansas can’t entice these companies here, what is the alternative?
“You have to grow them yourself,” Ahlen said. “You have to start them and nurture them and grow them yourself.”
It’s a tough assignment, but Beebe has called on a multi-lingual international marketer with a stout resume to help lead the charge.
Maria Haley — born in the Philippines, the daughter of a diplomat, and educated at the Universidad de Centro Madrid in Spain — was appointed to head the state’s Economic Development Commission (AEDC).
Haley, who has worked in international business development since 1979, speaks four languages. She began a 13-year tenure at the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission (now AEDC) in 1979, during which time the number of Arkansas export businesses doubled and foreign investments tripled in Arkansas.
During the 1990s, President Bill Clinton nominated Haley as a member of the board of the Export Import Bank of the U.S. helping to manage a $55 billion portfolio aimed at promoting U.S. exports. Mandated by Congress as the advocate for small businesses, Haley was confirmed twice by the U.S. Senate, served five years, and led the Bank’s Africa programs initiative.
She has also served as an advisor and consultant to the Philippine government President Gloria Arroyo. Prior to Beebe’s request to serve on his cabinet, Haley had been senior director since 2001 at Kissinger McLarty Associates, specializing in Asia-related projects.
Haley Recommends Mary Good
When Haley first went to Washington as deputy assistant to President Clinton and deputy director of presidential personnel at the White House, she made the recommendation to the administration to appoint Mary Good as undersecretary of commerce for technology. Good now serves as founding dean of UALR’s Donaghey College of Information Science and Systems Engineering.*
Shortly after the 2007 legislative session ended, Haley described to members of the Little Rock Downtown Partnership how she first came to Arkansas in the 1970s following her heart to Little Rock, a picturesque small town with its springtime array of dogwood, azaleas, redbuds, and Bradford pears all in bloom.
“Let me take a moment and bring you back to those days when there was hardly a single soul in downtown Little Rock after 6 p.m. Today, we see excitement, life, and vitality in the city — restaurants, hotels, office buildings, and businesses of all kinds are springing up daily, and people are strolling around until late at night.”
She credited the changes to “visionary” leaders who dreamt of a new downtown and set about to create it.
The same thing — dreaming and creating — is happening in other parts of the city, the region, and the state. The common denominator is education.
Mary Good agrees wholeheartedly.
She looks like a quintessential grandmother with snowy hair who favors no-fuss pantsuits and sensible shoes. In reality, Good is an internationally-recognized inorganic chemist, holds 24 honorary degrees, and was appointed to a science and technology advisory board by Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Clinton, assisting American industry in advancing productivity, technology, and innovation to make the U.S. more competitive in the global market.
Now she is doing the same thing for Arkansas.
It won’t be easy. It is no secret that knowledge-based economic development is the key to prosperity in the 21st century. Plenty of regions have a head start, and Arkansas has been handicapped by an ongoing brain drain.
“It would please me very much if before I die we get better than Mississippi and Louisiana,” she told members of the AEDC as she clicked her laser pointer on a PowerPoint slide showing Arkansas on the bottom of a statistical heap.
Filling the Pipeline
Good works tirelessly to raise those statistical odds, sometimes going after one bright, inquisitive mind at a time, encouraging the student to stay in Arkansas and contribute to the Natural State’s renaissance.
Recruiters in her college go far beyond finding students to fill this semester’s Donaghey College classes. They fan out among the state’s junior high schools looking for eager sixth-, seventh- and eighth- graders, offering summer enrichment experiences and encouraging them to take the rigorous math and science classes in high school that will prepare them for studying higher-level engineering and technology courses.
For students whose rural, isolated schools can’t provide the high-level math courses needed, UALR offers web-based pre-calculus classes.
For eighth-grade girls on the cusp of adolescence when social distractions can derail academic interests, Good’s engineering and information technology college supports activities for Girls of Promise, a Women’s Foundation of Arkansas program that exposes girls to young professional women like astronauts and knowledge-based CEOs to encourage them to keep their eyes on the prize.
“Look at the excitement in the eyes of these kids,” Good said as she clicked to another video screen in a recent presentation to AEDC representatives. The students were competing in a high-tech, high-energy match of Botball®. The Donaghey College sponsors several teams of high school students who compete regionally and nationally in a computer programming competition that involves Lego robots and ping pong balls.
Another UALR outreach is its support for the Environmental and Spatial Technology (EAST) Lab, a program created by a teacher in Greenbrier that puts teams of students — at all academic levels — on projects to solve real community problems. EAST students have developed a tornado warning system using geographic information system (GIS) technology to place warning sirens and a computer-aided design (CAD) technology to automate all the necessary forms police need when reporting accidents.
UALR trains Arkansas school personnel to facilitate EAST labs.
“The interesting thing about these kids — is that the lights are on,” said Jerry Adams of Acxiom, an international knowledge- based data mining firm home grown in central Arkansas and a mainstay of the Little Rock region’s IT economic cluster.
“This (EAST) program captures kids who may not have succeeded in traditional high school settings, but they are real bright kids and we’ve got to save them,” he said.
Without bright, computer-savvy graduates of Arkansas high schools and world-class graduates of the Donaghey College, Acxiom’s long-term future in central Arkansas would be in doubt. “It’s a pipeline issue for us,” Adams, chair of Accelerate Arkansas, said. As for his and his company’s commitment to the goals of Accelerate Arkansas, he said, “The flip side is we’d love to have 50 Acxioms, 200 Acxioms in central Arkansas.”
UALR’s efforts are paying off to keep that pipeline full.
Last spring, 21 of the 121 graduates of the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts (ASMSA) enrolled at UALR. More of the 2006 graduates attended UALR than any other university. ASMSA is a public residential high school for academically advanced juniors and seniors. With new apartment- style dorms and priority registration for cyber scholars, more and more of the state’s most talented students are opting to study under world — class professors and have access to state-of-the-art laboratory equipment.
Keeping Arkansas’ best and brightest in the state dramatically increases the chance that they will establish their careers in state, joining the cluster-building effort to reach Arkansas’ economic goals.
“That’s very much how they grew information technology companies in Silicon Valley,” said Ahlen. “As communities and regions begin to think about new economic development thrusts, the resources of higher education and the resources of lab scientists and engineers become the driving forces in this economy.”
But transforming Arkansas’ economy will take more than the work of government leaders, economists, CEOs, and teachers from pre-schools to universities.
It will take a concerted effort by the parents of Arkansas children to raise their expectations.
“You do it by educating both the parents as well as the children that we live in a different world,” Beebe said. “What used to work, what used to be sufficient to get the job necessary to raise a family, is different today.
“We’re no longer competing with a neighboring county or neighboring state. We are competing with everybody in the whole world.”
* Special Note: The UALR Donaghey College of Information Science and Systems Engineering has a new name, which was approved at press time for this publication. The new name, officially approved by the University of Arkansas System’s Board of Trustees, is the “Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology (EIT).”