Knowledge Is ‘a Form of Venture Capital’ for a Top Columbia Administrator

Michael Crow seeks out business projects designed to exploit the university’s academic prowess

It’s been a pretty routine two months for Michael M. Crow.

Four days in Taiwan meeting with government leaders; a day in Atlanta talking up a Columbia University public-policy center at the Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention; off to California to see if Stanford University would join Columbia’s big commercial Internet venture, Fathom; back to New York, on a redeye, to meet with Columbia professors concerned about the university’s financial ties to Fathom; then down to Washington to play host at a lunch for several Congressional aides who had helped Columbia lobby (unsuccessfully) for an extension of a lucrative drug patent.

Columbia’s executive vice provost also spent a day near Tucson, where he managed to get U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson to sign a research pact with the university’s Biosphere 2 just two days before leaving office. While at the artificial ecosystem, he taught his graduate seminar back at Columbia, using videoconferencing equipment.

The breadth of Mr. Crow’s agenda matches the eclectic and unusual portfolio that he has gradually assumed during 11 years at Columbia. Today he has a job that may well be one of kind in academe -- in large part, his friends and colleagues say, because of the way he has defined it. “We use the word ‘academic entrepreneurs,’” says Mr. Crow with practiced ease. “We are expanding what it means to be a knowledge enterprise. We use knowledge as a form of venture capital.”

That means pushing Columbia beyond the usual university role of creating knowledge and then disseminating it through traditional forms of publication and classroom teaching. The idea, he says, is “on every front, [to] take that knowledge, incubate it, and project it” out into the world, using tools like the Internet for academic content, licensing or spinoff strategies for new scientific ideas, or living laboratories -- like New York City and the Hudson River -- for trying out ideas to improve schools or clean up waterways.

A few other institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University, are beginning to think the same way, especially as online-education companies begin to chip away at their franchise, and as the institutions consider the commercial potential of what they do.

Few, if any, however, have an official so focused on finding and executing strategies for that mission, or who express the sense of public purpose that Mr. Crow does. He is also known for grasping angles and opportunities faster than anyone else in the room -- “the kind of person who can play three-dimensional chess,” as one colleague puts it.

While Mr. Crow’s style -- the full-court press -- is all his own, his agenda and institutional influence come from Columbia’s provost, Jonathan Cole, from the president, George Rupp, and from the Board of Trustees.

Not everyone on the campus is as enamored of the institution’s push into digital ventures, or of the way Mr. Crow wields control over so many of its resources.

Nonetheless, he has managed to remain relatively uncontroversial either because colleagues are reluctant to criticize someone who has gained so much influence, or

because of the deft way he does his job. It certainly helps that he doesn’t routinely vote on tenure decisions, as the provost does, which can often leave bitter feelings.

Hired from Iowa State University, where as director of university initiatives he was well known for helping the institution win millions in earmarked grants from Congress, Mr. Crow came to Columbia in 1991 to develop interdisciplinary programs. His duties now include responsibility for Columbia’s enormously successful patenting and licensing operations, for Fathom, and for several other efforts to spin off digital products and companies based on the work of faculty members.

He is in charge of Columbia’s Strategic Initiatives Fund, financed out of patent proceeds to provide seed money for innovative, cross-departmental projects. He also supervises more-traditional programs of sponsored research financed with government and corporate money.

He oversees the Columbia Earth Institute, an amalgam of programs, projects, and centers -- including the recently acquired Biosphere 2 and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory -- devoted to research and teaching on sustainability.

Mr. Crow thinks big, even audaciously. When Columbia officials were deciding in 1995 whether to take on Biosphere 2, he saw the potential for teaching and research there, even though at the time, the large complex was known more for its oddball appeal than its science (The Chronicle, February 18, 2000). It’s “the screwiest thing he did, and probably the best one,” says Barry Bozeman, a mentor and academic collaborator of Mr. Crow’s who is a professor of public policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Mr. Bozeman was Mr. Crow’s Ph.D. adviser in public policy at Syracuse University in the 1980’s. The day Mr. Crow came to see him -- having driven all night with some buddies from Illinois -- Mr. Bozeman had to leave the office for his son’s Little League game. Mr. Crow, a javelin thrower in college, came along. “I interviewed him while he was throwing batting practice,” Mr. Bozeman recalls. “He was pretty persistent. I’m glad he was.”

In 1998, the two founded the Center for Science Policy & Outcomes, a Washington-based think tank, financed for now with $200,000 to $300,000 yearly from Columbia. The center works to reshape scientific priorities so more research goes toward actually serving the needs of society.

Another of Mr. Crow’s big ideas, which officials here are still kicking around, is to build on Columbia’s success in commercializing its patents by adding an international dimension.

Through his and others’ connections with universities in Quebec as well as in Israel, Sweden, and Taiwan, Mr. Crow is proposing that the institutions work together to market their patents to corporations, using the expertise of Columbia Innovation Enterprises, the in-house licensing operation. (Columbia “quite purposely” doesn’t call it technology transfer, as most other institutions do, he says; it prefers the image of “innovation.”)

Columbia ranked first among American universities in earnings from patent royalties for the past two years. Its royalty revenue for the 2000 fiscal year was more than $143-million. Columbia almost certainly will lead the pack again in 2001.

“When we give the C.I.E. story to Quebec and Taiwan, they just sit there and their mouths are just open,” says Mr. Crow, his eyes twinkling. Pooling patents with other institutions could improve the bottom line for them all, he says. “More of our technology could potentially be commercialized,” because single patents could be leveraged if they were paired with those of other universities. Columbia would also take a fee for managing the operation.

Building up patent revenue isn’t just about ranking first, however, Mr. Crow says. About 10 to 15 percent of Columbia’s patent revenue goes into the seven-year-old Strategic Initiatives Fund, which finances many of Columbia’s digital experiments as well as interdisciplinary research projects. In the past five years, the fund has paid for more than $70-million worth of research.

It’s “the freest money that we have,” says Mr. Crow, because it comes with no company or government-agency agenda.

With oversight from the provost -- a force for interdisciplinary research -- he uses the fund to encourage unusual collaborations. For example, the fund financed the work of faculty members and graduate students in anthropology and climate change who studied how fishing practices in Peru would change depending on how and when communities there received climate-prediction reports.

The fund’s projects are expected to become self-sustaining, although not necessarily commercially profitable. They could be considered successful if they attracted outside grant support, or if university departments later found it worthwhile to absorb their costs. About three-quarters of the fund’s projects have attracted additional research support.

Many of the projects fit with Columbia’s global ambitions. “We are deadly serious about being an international university -- not just in the form of having international students,” Mr. Crow says.

He is also in charge of planning for possible new campuses, which also might involve a greater international presence.

Much of his work reflects his own intellectual and entrepreneurial passions. He gets excited by projects that lead to other projects, that leverage more kinds of funding, and that result in new collaborations. It’s all part of what he sees as his role as “an academic program builder.”

Colleagues and underlings at Columbia say Mr. Crow is at once demanding and supportive. “He’s good at making everybody feel important and on the team,” says Michael J. Cleare, a 30-year veteran of the pharmaceutical industry who was recently recruited by Mr. Crow to direct the patenting and licensing of science and technology inventions.

They also marvel at his prodigious output. “You get eight-word e-mails at all hours of the day or night,” says G. Todd Hardy, another new hire. He directs Digital Knowledge Ventures, an arm of the licensing enterprise that is working on commercializing digital content to create continuing-education classes and advanced-placement curricula.

Mr. Crow sends the short e-mail messages from the keyboard-equipped Motorola pager that is always with him, along with a cell phone and a Palm Pilot. Colleagues have become accustomed to the low buzz from his pager during meetings, and to the way he taps back messages while keeping up with the flow of discussion around him. (He likes old technology, too; he records his decisions by dashing off reminders on sheets of legal paper. And during brainstorming sessions, he’s usually at the whiteboard, excitedly diagramming arrows and boxes to show how various programs could interrelate.)

David Stern, commissioner of the National Basketball Association and vice chairman of Columbia’s trustees, gets some of Mr. Crow’s electronic missives, although his are typically of the longer variety. They exchange e-mail notes late at night, “when we implore each other to go to sleep,” says Mr. Stern.

As chairman of Fathom, Mr. Stern has worked closely with Mr. Crow for more than a year. For the Internet venture, Mr. Crow appreciates the need for marketing, branding, and communication, says Mr. Stern. “I find he has a remarkable range.”

Mr. Crow’s work with trustees has also helped to generate a $10-million gift from Lionel I. Pincus, a trustee emeritus and a founder of the Warburg Pincus venture-capital firm. Mr. Pincus directed the gift -- his biggest to Columbia -- to be used as investment capital for Columbia’s entrepreneurial ventures.

Not everyone at Columbia is as enamored of Mr. Crow’s activities as his employers. Some faculty members and administrators in the medical school say Mr. Crow’s discretionary grant allocations to them do not reflect the large amounts of money the school generates from patents.

A few Columbia insiders say that Mr. Crow and the dean of arts and sciences, David H. Cohen, are sometimes at odds, and had, as one professor put it, “an enormous brawl” a year or so ago over a deal with a company called Cognitive Arts, which is putting courses from the College of Arts and Sciences online. Mr. Crow felt that the financial and academic protections initially negotiated by the dean and the company weren’t sufficient, according to professors with knowledge of the clash. Mr. Crow raised similar concerns about an initial proposal for a deal between Columbia’s business school and a company called UNEXT.com.

Mr. Cohen did not return telephone calls seeking comment, and Mr. Crow declines to discuss the disagreements, although he does note that authority for both of those projects is now within his purview, as part of Digital Knowledge Ventures.

Given Columbia’s institutional structure, the tensions are natural, says Mr. Crow, who once jokingly described Mr. Cohen as “our nemesis” to his staff members, and then recoiled at the thought that his words might be repeated and taken the wrong way. “He’s running the store day-to-day, and I’m out making investments that affect his units,” says Mr. Crow, by way of explanation. “He probably wishes, as do others, that he had this money” or that he could approve all of the investments that affect people in his college.

Mr. Crow is known for his political savvy, but he is still mindful of his reputation as “an earmarker.” It’s a tag that dates from his days at Iowa State in the late 1980’s, when he helped it win tens of millions of dollars in direct appropriations from Congress. Iowa State’s research agenda had been too tied to hogs, soy, corn, and cattle, he says. It was his job to “conceive and design research projects to alter the trajectory,” he says. “We used every political tool we had.”

These days, he deploys that acumen in New York. “Michael decodes Columbia for me,” says Ann G. Kirschner, the former Internet guru for the National Football League who now directs Fathom.

Mr. Crow, for example, has advised Fathom officials that they might receive a warmer welcome in some schools or departments at Columbia if they make a point of first courting influential faculty members to contribute to the Web site.

Columbia has put a total of $18-million toward Fathom so far. Fathom had been told to find additional investors by the end of January. When it failed to find a suitable investor, Columbia agreed to allocate another $10-million to the venture for two more years.

Kate Wittenberg, a former director of the Columbia University Press and now director of Columbia Interactive, an online scholarly-publishing initiative, says Mr. Crow’s role is sometimes misunderstood because of his entrepreneurial focus.

“People think he’s trying to change the mission of the university. I think he’s trying to keep the mission” and allow it to flourish in an environment where universities are increasingly compelled to have a sophisticated business strategy. “I think he’s absolutely on track.”

She recalls her first meeting with Mr. Crow, more than three years ago, over her then-vague plan for Columbia to begin aggregating scholarly materials online. “I went in there and sort of babbled for a half-hour” she says. Mr. Crow quickly saw the potential in her idea and provided her with $150,000 from the Strategic Initiatives Fund to start what has become Earth-scape, a digital database of earth-science journals. It has since received $600,000 from the National Science Foundation.

Still, Ms. Wittenberg recognizes that Mr. Crow’s cut-to-the-chase demeanor isn’t typical in academe. “There are people who would completely be freaked out by this,” she notes.

His agenda has, in fact, unnerved some members of Columbia’s academic community. “We’re an Old Economy corporation,” says Richard W. Bulliet, a professor of history, lamenting what seems to him like a great push to transform the institution into a digital venture. That, he says, “has a marginalizing effect on the faculty” members whose fields or teaching styles don’t lend themselves to such changes. “A lot of what this university does, and what other universities do, isn’t new and isn’t going to get better.”

Robert Jervis, a professor of political science, says Mr. Crow’s singular position in the hierarchy affects how faculty members regard him. “He sits on the only uncontrolled revenue stream of the university. That makes him very popular.” And while most people think that Mr. Crow invests pretty well, Mr. Jervis says his role inspires some “nervousness” among faculty members: “Doesn’t one person have too much power?”

Fits and starts in Columbia’s digital operations have created additional unease about Mr. Crow’s focus, Mr. Jervis says. A couple of years ago, Columbia formed Morningside Ventures to create digital-content spinoff companies, then seemed to shift its focus to Fathom, and then revived the spinoff idea with Columbia Media Enterprises, which is now called Digital Knowledge Ventures. “The big criticism is that he goes off in five directions at once,” says Mr. Jervis.

Yet even as they question some of the policies Mr. Crow is charged with carrying out, faculty members say they appreciate his candor and respect his intellect.

Mr. Bulliet, one of five professors appointed by the Faculty Senate to report on Columbia’s ties to Fathom, says Mr. Crow impressed him with his openness when they met in December. “Mike gave us numbers, which we never had before. He was “quite forthcoming.”

Last year when Columbia was reevaluating its copyright policies, Mr. Bulliet says, he admired Mr. Crow’s willingness to compromise and give faculty members greater control over rights to their content.

Last year, Mr. Crow himself became a tenured member of the faculty, in the School of International and Public Affairs. He teaches a graduate course on “Science and Technology Policy and Politics,” a topic that he has also written about in books and articles.

“More than many people in positions like that, I think he has real intellectual interests,” says Mr. Jervis, who is president of the American Political Science Association. “His reputation is quite good -- for an administrator.”

Mr. Crow makes no apologies for the direction in which he is pushing Columbia.

“We are one of the 20 or 30 most significant global-educational enterprises on earth,” he says. The university “can’t just do the historic things.”

As for his own high-energy manner? “It’s a strategic style of mine. You start many, many, things. Some will make it. Many won’t.” But in the end, he says, the strategy helps increase the odds that more projects will have succeeded.

Just 45, Mr. Crow doesn’t know where this job may lead. A college presidency is, of course, an interesting possibility, he says, but only if “it’s a place that values innovation and creativity.”

http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Page: A29