Research Triangle Park, the king of university-affiliated business development, is 11 square miles of North Carolina pine forest laced with blue-chip tenants that include IBM, Monsanto, Cisco Systems, and Dupont.
Its companies have landed more than 3,200 patents and registered more than 1,900 trademarks, with popular discoveries that include artificial turf, the product bar code, and the cancer drug Taxol. Over 55 years, Research Triangle Park, referred to here as RTP, has become an undisputed economic success, spawning imitators and challengers all over the country.
Yet from his gleaming glass-and-brick headquarters in the middle of it all, the park’s director, Robert T. Geolas, is troubled by an increasingly glaring absence: He can’t just walk outside to get a cup of coffee.
“We’re half the size of the island of Manhattan, and you can’t buy a Starbucks coffee anywhere in RTP,” said Mr. Geolas, who arrived in 2011. “It’s amazing.”
It’s not because he needs the caffeine.
Instead, it’s an atmosphere of inventive collaboration that Mr. Geolas wants badly to promote. A recent internal strategy document stated it plainly: For all its storied accomplishments, Research Triangle Park faces an urgent need to change, largely because of a sprawling suburban-style layout that attracts big established companies but has nurtured relatively few start-ups.
Mr. Geolas is not alone. Many of the nation’s university-affiliated research parks were built on open land miles from cities and campuses. And now, whether owned by the universities or, like Research Triangle Park, by regional partnerships, many recognize a pressing need to spend heavily to reconfigure themselves, finding that sustained economic growth depends as much on quality-of-life factors as on raw scientific firepower.
A recent survey for the Association of University Research Parks made clear the sentiment. More than 100 North American parks responded, with many outlining plans to soon add retail shops, restaurants, and housing to their developments. Altogether, the number of parks offering “live-work-play environments” was expected to more than triple, from 6 percent to 21 percent, within five years, the survey found.
In many cases, that means a huge overhaul. Along with the costs—as much as $2-billion in the case of Research Triangle Park—the parks and their universities can face a variety of challenges, including finding available land near the campus, getting the right mix of potential nonacademic distractions, and keeping their educational missions clear.
More Than Research
With 38,000 workers at more than 170 companies in 22 million square feet of buildings over 7,000 acres, Research Triangle Park is the largest research park in North America. And RTP isn’t just about its big corporate campuses—it has five buildings devoted to start-up ventures, and 60 percent of its companies have 20 employees or fewer. But today’s entrepreneurs, Mr. Geolas said in an interview, want more-inclusive settings where they can meet with one another, share ideas, find new workers, and just enjoy themselves.
For inspiration, Mr. Geolas has visited leading places of commercial innovation around the country, including Silicon Valley and Boston. But he also recognizes worthwhile examples nearby. Down the road, in downtown Durham, N.C., the abandoned remnants of a once-mighty tobacco industry have experienced a high-tech revival over the past decade. The showcase example is the longtime home of the American Tobacco Company—several blocks of century-old brick factories that have been transformed into an entrepreneurial playground of offices, apartments, restaurants, retail stores, and meeting spaces.
The epitome of urban and trendy, the American Tobacco Campus development features interiors of open atriums, sleek metal framing, and exposed wooden beams. It has an outdoor amphitheater, tree-lined pedestrian pathways, and a quarter-mile-long cascading waterway that leads to the newly rebuilt home field of minor-league baseball’s iconic Durham Bulls.
Duke University, recognizing its deep stake in the health of downtown Durham, has made itself essential to the success of the American Tobacco Campus, said one of the project’s founders, Michael J. Goodmon. Duke relocated offices from its campus to provide a base of tenants in the project’s founding days of 2004, then essentially shrank or expanded its rental presence as needed in the following years to ensure that the development survived and then thrived, Mr. Goodmon said.
At first, the university had to recruit Duke workers for the site, said Scott F. Selig, the university’s associate vice president for capital assets and real estate. Now, even researchers with labs on the campus want to be downtown, attracted by greater lunch options and a hipper vibe, Mr. Selig said.
“We have more people asking to come downtown than we do asking to go back to campus, by far,” he said. “I don’t have to pick up the phone anymore—they’re generally calling me.”
Young companies that have set up shop at the American Tobacco Campus certainly understand that. One, a computer-services company called Smashing Boxes, began four years ago with eight employees in a basement-level section of the project known as American Underground that is reserved for small start-ups. It now has 50 employees and recently moved upstairs and across the street into a more-traditional office location in the project.
Smashing Boxes workers are mostly in their 20s and 30s, and the attractiveness of the development was central in luring many of them, said a company co-founder, Nick Jordan, a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Another fledgling tenant, Oncoscope, the maker of a optical biopsy device for diagnosing cancers, was struggling to survive in 2009 when it hired an experienced corporate manager, Perry A. Genova, to help turn it around. Mr. Genova took exploratory steps toward moving the company out near Research Triangle Park, where rents were about half the $26-per-square-foot price at the American Tobacco Campus.
But after six months, Mr. Genova said he realized the overriding value of the Durham location, especially given his decision to essentially clean house and find new talent to run the company. “We knew we were going to be recruiting people,” he said, “and we wanted to be sure that they didn’t look at our location and say, ‘Well, I’ll stay where I’m at.’”
Mr. Genova, who is also a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, said he remembered Durham a decade ago as a place that people avoided. Now, the attractions include a weekly gathering with his Oncoscope team at a local pub that features selections from a different brewery every Wednesday night. The gatherings serve as a rich opportunity to exchange ideas with industry colleagues. “There’s so many elements to this, and benefits to this location, that they’re hard to enumerate,” he said.
Rebooting a Brand
Back at RTP, Mr. Geolas knows that very well. With a 3-percent vacancy rate and $1-billion in investments over the past five years, Research Triangle Park “is still a very successful brand,” he said. “But the reality is that, as successful as that brand is, it’s probably more recognizable among people who are 45, 50, 55, 65 years old than it is among people who are 25 years old.”
Its initial redevelopment plans, outlined this month, suggest an ambitious strategy. The first round of the expansion, known collectively as Park Center, will begin next year and run at least three years. The result will be a mix of shops, restaurants, and residential developments, essentially creating a town of some 4,000 people.
A fan of Walt Disney, Mr. Geolas draws comparisons to the cartoonist’s original concept of his Epcot project, which was to have been a prototype city where companies could experiment with innovations in urban life. The Park Center project will be led by the London-based developer Gerald D. Hines and will include Mary Margaret Jones, a landscape architect known for the High Line, in Manhattan, and Stanton Eckstut, an architect whose work includes Battery Park City, also in New York City.
The Epcot vision might even prove more realistic at Research Triangle Park than at Disney’s development, Mr. Geolas argued, given all the technological pioneers already located there.
Mr. Geolas also anticipates expanded participation by the park’s partner universities. North Carolina State University is discussing the creation of a design studio at the site, and Duke is considering a venue for reimagining the workings of health-care systems.
Still, as badly as Research Triangle Park needs to update its physical space, Mr. Geolas describes the overriding goal as the improvement of RTP’s “collaborative” profile. To that end, the Park Center expansion includes the creation of a “Convergence Center” for finding areas of common ground between scientific technology and the humanities, and for connecting urban and rural communities. A key feature, he said, will be a communications network for more extensively sharing discoveries with communities across North Carolina that are also seeking economic growth through technological advancement.
Then there’s the financing. The park was founded 55 years ago by a partnership of public and private donors, and operates as a structure separate from the universities. It now has assets of about $200-million in cash and land value, and expects much of the new construction to be financed by investors in the property.
That scale of reinvention may be difficult for many university-affiliated research parks across the country to emulate. The association’s survey found that about half of the parks have an operating budget of less than $1-million, meaning major initiatives often require outside financial help.
Given the economic benefits of such parks—it’s estimated they generate nearly one million jobs across North America—the association has been pressing Congress for legislation that would provide planning grants and loan guarantees to build research parks and technology incubators. The failure to act is another example of the United States’ losing ground in the science-based global economy to competitors in China, India, and the Middle East that are rapidly building such facilities, the association has argued.
Within American cities, however, operators of research parks largely describe the alternative models—including many now being built by cities in downtown areas without any university affiliation—as helpful rather than competitive.
Concerns about too much competition within a city or a region can be heard at times, said Bruce A. Wright, an associate vice president at the University of Arizona and director of its Tech Parks Arizona developments.
But some types of work—such as, in Arizona’s case, solar-power and electrical-grid testing and some defense-related sensor technologies—simply require large open spaces, Mr. Wright said. Many other types of research-related work, often in fields such as health care and computer-related applications, can be located in smaller-scale urban settings, he said.
“We need a whole series of different places to do these kinds of things,” said Mr. Wright, a past president of the Association of University Research Parks. His office operates a 1,300-acre suburban research park several miles from the university while building an alternative closer to the campus. As does Mr. Geolas, Mr. Wright said he recognizes that the traditional research park “is no longer sufficient” for the way many people now like to live.
Hidden Dangers?
Mr. Geolas has experience managing the kind of service mix he hopes to bring to RTP. A decade ago he led a project out of North Carolina State University called the Centennial Campus, one of the nation’s first efforts to combine a research park with student dormitories, nonstudent housing, and other trappings of urban life.
Covering two square miles, the Centennial Campus has three apartment complexes, a lake, a fishing pier, and a golf course. That’s along with some 60 corporate tenants and more than 70 academic departments, including most of N.C. State’s College of Engineering.
For its part, N.C. State doesn’t see a residential-based expansion of Research Triangle Park as a threat to the Centennial Campus, said Terri L. Lomax, the university’s vice chancellor for research, innovation, and economic development. “Amazing, it seems to be infinite,” Ms. Lomax said of the area’s growth in research-based industry. “You would think at some point it’s going to saturate, and it doesn’t seem to.”
But even the unambiguous success of models such as the American Tobacco Campus can raise worries. The current chief executive officer of the Association of University Research Parks, Eileen Walker, said she is certainly impressed by the creative reuse of old urban downtowns, including the tobacco factories in Durham and other North Carolina cities.
But in carefully chosen words, she mused about a future in which cities strive to create metropolitan playgrounds for Angry Birds developers, and gently sketched out a fear that the overeager pursuit of such islands of application-driven creativity might hollow out the core scientific competencies that made American research universities into world leaders.
“We need to just be circumspect,” she said. “I mean, we love ballgames, and that’s super, and everybody loves to be entertained when they get off work. But at the end of the day, we have to make sure that the whole purpose of a university, and the purpose of university research parks, which support the missions of universities—that basic research needs to be respected.”
