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Science-Based Economic Development edited by Susan Raymond
W. Henry Lambright
The Maxwell School of Public Affairs
Syracuse University
Maine
Science and Engineering Profile
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Actual | 50-State Rank |
|---|---|---|
| General | ||
| Population, 1994 | 1,240,000 | 39 |
| Civilian Labor Force, 1994 | 612,000 | 40 |
| Personal income per capita | $19,663 | 43 |
| Gross state product, 1992 (billions) | $24.1 | 43 |
| Science and Engineering | ||
| Doctoral scientists, 1993 | 1,867 | 40 |
| Doctoral engineers, 1993 | 245 | 42 |
| S&E doctorates awarded, 1993 | 30 | 48 |
| S&E post-doctorates, 1993 | 17 | 49 |
| S&E graduate students, 1993 | 842 | 49 |
| Federal Spending | ||
| Total Expenditures, 1994 (millions) | $6,708 | 40 |
| R&D obligations, 1993 (millions) | $65 | 46 |
| Total R&D performance, 1993 (millions) | $114 | 47 |
| Industry R&D, 1993 (millions) | $59 | 45 |
| Academic R&D, 1993 (millions) | $25 | 50 |
| of which, in life sciences | 57% |
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| of which, in environmental sciences | 19% |
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| of which, in engineering | 12% |
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Higher education current-fund expenditures, 1993 (millions) |
$599 | 42 |
| Number of SBIR awards, 1990-93 | 39 | 34 |
| Patents issued to state residents, 1994 | 118 | 43 |
How can society move from one level of economic development to another? How can it transition from a science and technology base that is behind most of its peers to one that is more equal? How can science, technology, and economic development be integrated? who is to integrate? How? What is the nature of leadership in moving a "traditional" society to a higher (or at least different) plane? What are the requisite strategies?
The answers to the above questions are not easy to find. They are complex and vary from one society to the next. What may be true for nation-states may not be for subnational institutions. Yet there is a plane on which some comparison can be made, analogies drawn, and lessons learned. What is involved at its core is change, and the processes of change have a certain rhythm. There is usually a period of stasis that is interrupted by forces inside or outside a system. These disruptive influences may peter out against resistances of varying sorts. But they may also find a way to work their wills- for better or worse. Among the most interesting questions in social science are those concerning leadership of change and resistance thereto.
It is helpful to recapitulate and analyze the change process in Maine, a state that has witnessed attempts at change in science, technology and economic development for over fifteen years. The problems in this setting are in many ways like those of developing nations in the international system: becoming competitive as a state is akin to becoming more competitive as a nation.
The Case of Maine
Maine is a relatively large and sparsely populated state in the far northeast corner of the United States. A huge wedge of land between the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec, Maine is a resource-rich state. Ninety percent of Maine is covered with forests and there are approximately 2,500 lakes. Most of the population of 1.3 million is concentrated in the southern part of the state, where the city of Portland is the state's biggest, with 65,000 people. Northern Maine is a beautiful and very isolated land, a mix of public and privately owned forests.
Not surprisingly, Maine's economy has historically relied on trees and their products. Paper mills abound. Maine is also dependent upon fishing and agriculture. Mining has also been important. Maine's economy has had its ups and downs. In recent years, the downs have been pronounced. While it has some nationally known firms (e.g., L.L. Bean), most of Maine's companies (90%) have fewer than fifty employees. It is a "low-tech" state, for the most part.
Politically, Maine is generally seen as conservative, although it regularly elects Democrats, some of whom, such as former Senate majority leader George Mitchell, rise to national prominence. Within the state, the governor serves a four-year term. He may serve no more than two terms in succession. The state legislature has two bodies, the 33-member senate and 151-member house. The legislature meets for relatively brief periods each year. Its members are part-time legislators, as salaries are extremely low and staff extremely sparse. Mainers, as citizens of the state are called, are generally distrustful of strong government and in 1993 voted by referendum a term limit of legislators.
Maine has a number of fine small colleges (e.g., Bates, Colby, Bowdoin College) but only one Ph.D.-granting institution, the state land-grant college, the University of Maine at Orono. Another large state university, the University of Southern Maine in Portland, serves much of the function that community colleges do in other states. Maine has been ranked in the bottom third of states in total R&D spending, 43rd in total federal R&D obligations, 48th in federal R&D obligations at universities and colleges, 49th in science and engineering graduate students. Maine is one of only four states in the nation that does not have a federal laboratory. While its science infrastructure is generally weak, it does have a cluster of internationally recognized non-profit research laboratories including the Jackson Laboratory, Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science, Maine Medical Center Research Institute, Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, and the Foundation for Blood Research.
The culture of Maine is traditional rather than change oriented. Many Mainers like their ways and distrust outsiders. They are provincial and distrustful of the highly educated. But other Mainers are people who came to Maine to get away from the hustle-bustle of more urbanized states. There is a relative shortage of leaders who seek to work together to move their state forward economically. "Working together" is not the Maine style. There is no power elite in Maine in the sense of indigenous old-family wealth or big business plutocracy. Mainers see themselves as largely exploited by outside-owned firms (e.g., timber companies) as well as individuals who develop their beautiful land for summer camps. There is a lot of poverty in Maine. This is a relatively poor state and it is reluctant to spend what it does have on public services. Taxes are extremely unpopular, as is ostentation of any sort. Mainers take pride in their parsimony: "we do more for less." Maybe so, but there has been a growing awareness in the state that the economic trends are against it.
The number of jobs in traditional industries in Maine has been going down and is likely to go down more. Maine has little choice but to find new ways to make a living. But moving to new industries requires change, and Mainers, as we noted, are very wary of change. Yet a process of change has been slowly and fortuitously under way since the late 1970s.
Approach
We will examine the historical account of an effort to link science, technology, and economic development in Maine that extended from approximately 1980 to the present. This has gone through a sequence of stages: (1) trigger for action; (2) adoption of a program for change; (3) redirection; (4) development; and (5) crisis and response.
As the titles of these stages suggest, the Maine story is decidedly incomplete. It has come a long way from where it began in many respects. But there is a palpable vulnerability that is undeniable. The change process has yet to reach a definite point of closure.
The focus here is on what we call the policy entrepreneurs- those actors who have sought to shape the pace and direction of the Maine change process in science, technology, and economic development. As will be clear, they are a relative handful of actors from key institutions in Maine: the universities, the non-profit research institutes, industry, the governor, legislators, media, and bureaucracy. The interplay of these actors in Maine has been influenced by the federal government. Indeed, it was the federal government that triggered action in Maine. Throughout the process there has been a search to create and maintain a strong institutional catalyst or leader- an entity that can integrate policy for science, technology, and economic development and build political support for its program.
Trigger for Action: NSF EPSCoR 1978-1980
What activated the change process in Maine was not internal but from outside. In 1978, the National Science Foundation (NSF) created the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). Eligible were those states which received, with some consistency, the least amount of NSF money. This was a congressionally-inspired program to help give a "head start" to those less developed (scientifically) states, to help them better compete for federal R&D. Maine fell into the EPSCOR category.
Jack Talmadge and Joe Danek, NSF EPSCoR program leaders, came up to Maine to discuss the new effort with various research leaders of the state they had identified beforehand. The NSF made it clear that there would be just one proposal from a state. This meant research institutions would have to work together on a proposal.
Two institutions which emerged quickly were Bigelow and the University of Maine. However, Bigelow was aggressively interested and the university somewhat reticent. The director of Bigelow, Charles Yentsch, was nationally known. Formerly of the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, he typified the outsider who came to Maine to gain greater freedom. He was interested in enhancing further his already strong institution, an entity well known in marine sciences.
The principal decision maker at the university was Fred Hutchinson, Vice President for Research. He was initially skeptical of EPSCoR as a pork-barrel program, and did not wish to see the University of Maine labeled a remedial institution. Nevertheless, he allowed the university to become part of an ad hoc committee that also involved industry and non-profit research institutes. This group, chaired by Harris J. Bixler of Maine Colloids, a Maine company, began writing a planning grant, which was funded, followed by an implementing grant proposal for what became known as EPSCoR I.
Adoption of a Program for Change 1980-1984
In 1980, Maine received what came to be called its EPSCoR I (implementation) grant. It entailed $2.9 million and involved the University of Maine, Bigelow, and the Maine Geological Survey. The fiscal agent. or manager, was the university. This grant was intended to run for five years, but various extensions kept it officially alive until 1987. The leader of the program was not the university but a committee representing academic, industry, and state government people. The chair of the committee continued to be Harris Bixler.
Why Bixler? Bixler had been selected by the original ad hoc committee formed by the NSF A common view today is that he was chosen because he was a "neutral," and this was important given the perceived rivalry between Bigelow and the university. Whatever the reason, the leadership of the program never quite jelled. Bixler moved in the early 1980s, while still chair, from Maine Colloids to Avco Everett Research Laboratory, a firm based in Massachusetts. The university had administrative control over the money. Hutchinson departed the university in 1982 leaving something of a vacuum in research leadership. Bigelow remained aggressive, but narrowly so, stressing Bigelow interests.
The basic strategy of EPSCoR was to focus on bringing individual scientists up to a "competitive" position in two key areas: geological sciences and marine sciences. There was a competitive in-state process to select winning proposals. Marine sciences made up the bulk of the funding, and the money in this area was shared by the university and Bigelow. Hutchinson had originally hoped to include forestry/wood products research because of its importance to the Maine economy, but the proposal put forward by the university's researchers was so poor it never was transmitted to the NSF.
The general view today is that the geological science work of EPSCoR I proved outstanding, the work in the marine sciences much less so, and the hoped-for collaboration between Bigelow and the university did not materialize to any significant degree.
But the problem with the Maine project in the NSF's view was not the scientific performance, it was the matching money. The NSF required matching money from the state as evidence of commitment to change. Early on, those associated with EPSCoR in Maine approached Governor Joseph Brennan, a Democrat, who was sympathetic but beset with budget woes. There was strong business representation on the ad hoc committee, however, and one board member in particular, Halsey Smith, a Portland banker, strongly stated he could get the necessary money from private sources. He had great credibility with others on the committee and was extremely well connected in Maine. A lot of people believed him, including the NSE
rivalry between Bigelow and the university.So, EPSCoR I got under way and was well into implementation before the NSF began prodding the states about matching. The ad hoc committee urged the NSF not to worry, but Smith died during the course of EPSCoR I and there was no one who could deliver on his promise. The result was that Maine never came up with matching, aside from what might be considered "in-kind" investments from the university, such as contributed time.
The NSF continued funding EPSCoR I in Maine but made its displeasure known. For its part, Maine tried, but perhaps not hard enough, on the state government side. Certainly state politicians were not brought into a coalition of support. And perhaps this is because the institutional leaders- the ad hoc committee and project directors in the university and Bigelow- never became a united force for change. There was a sense in Maine that EPSCoR was a one-shot program, and the NSF, at least for the first few years, seemed to share that view. EPSCoR was an orphan within the NSE But then it became clear that Congress saw EPSCoR as a symbol of geographical spread and equity in federal R&D dollars. Congress was insistent that EPSCoR continue, and the NSF maintained and even enlarged the program. By this time, Maine was so far along in implementation that the NSF decided to finish the project and make it clear there would be no "second round" for Maine unless it shaped up. In 1984, Maine was about to get its house in order with change generated internally rather than from outside.
Redirection from the State, 1984-1990
The 1980s saw a surge of activity in states throughout the country concerned with high-technology-based economic development. Governor Brennan, aware of this, appointed a Maine Science and Technology Board to study possibilities in his state. The board was placed under the auspices of a state industrial development organization, the Maine Development Foundation. Under the direction of the board, an important report was published in 1985, Technology Strategy for Maine: Investing in Maine's Future.
To staff the board, which consisted primarily of business and other executives serving as volunteers, the head of the Maine Development Foundation, Henry Bourgeois, recruited a staff person, Tish Tanski, in 1986. Tanski came from Michigan, where she had been doing high-technology economic development work for the state government. Bourgeois gave her a copy of the report and $75,000 to get started.
Tanski's orientation was toward technology and business not science and universities. An example of "people transfer" from a developed to a less developed state, Tanski herself had been imbued with lessons from abroad. She had traveled in Europe where the concept of industrial policy was more accepted and in evidence. There, she had observed that networks of small firms could be organized to do together what they could not do separately. Establishing such networks became her chief priority. Also, in Michigan, efforts were underway to link universities and vocational schools to economic development, and this too, she believed, was important to Maine.
In 1987, she got a call from officials at the University of Maine. Would she go with them to a national conference of EPSCoR in Montana? They needed to show the NSF and other EPSCoR states that the state government had an interest in EPSCoR. Tanski knew nothing about EPSCoR but saw the need to attract federal funds to the state, as well as to attract the university to her economic development activity. She went, and recalls hearing the NSF hold Maine as the example of failure within the EPSCoR system. This was because of the absence of matching funds.
It became clear that the EPSCoR program was growing and would be funding additional new states as well as continuing with must of the original states. There was already a second round of funding under way. The NSF was willing to consid er Maine again-in a perverse way it was a prototype of the kind of state EPSCoR was intended to serve. But the NSF would nut deal with the existing ad hoc committee. There had to be a new governance structure, one that clearly tied the EPSCoR effort to state interest. To keep what momentum existed in Maine alive, the NSF allocated $150,000 for planning purposes and reorganization. The initial EPSCoR award, intended to end in 1985, had in fact been extended to 1987. This "bridge grant," as it was called, was provided in 1988.
There was now a new governor in Maine, John R. MeKernan, a Republican. Like his predecessor, he had economic development as a priority. He was being advised by a task force to forge a closer link between higher education and economic development. He saw the value of EPSCoR in this context. He was willing to listen when Tanski and others proposed an initiative in economic development tied to the creation of a new science and technology agency, which would be modeled on those that already existed in other, more advanced states. Hence, with the governor's sup port, in 1988 the board ceased to exist and the Maine Science and Technology Commission came into being. Tanski was the head of this executive department and reported to the commission through its chairperson.
Authorized by legislation, the commission had an initial budget of $1.5 million. It began with two programs. One was the Centers for Innovation. These embodied Tanski's concept of industry networks. Firms in three fields-aquaculture, metal and electronics, and biomedicine-were encouraged to cooperate, share information, and work with the commission to find ways to strengthen one another. The other program was EPSCoR, and at this time it consisted of a planning effort to prepare a proposal for a new NSF grant.
Tanski recruited various individuals to work with her on these programs. The person who came in time to play the primary role vis-á-vis both programs was a technically trained man, Terry Shehata. Shehata was a Mainer (University of Maine) who had left the state and wished to return. In addition, Tanski established a new body, the Research Excellence Partnership (REP), to perform the role the ad hoc committee had previously played for planning EPSCoR. REP was headed by E. J. Lovett, Director of the Maine Medical Center Research Institute. Lovett, from Massachusetts, had been seeking, unsuccessfully, to establish in Maine an academy of science modeled on that of New York and other states. Lovett proved to be a highly committed individual, though he, like other research administrators recruited to REP served as an unpaid volunteer. The interest of these people was that they could help their own institutions (represented on REP) if the overall level of the state's science and economy was raised.
In 1989, Tanski left the commission to become Assistant Director of Jackson Laboratory. She had presided over a time of restructuring and growth in Maine's science-and technology-based economic activity. Her budget had gone from $75,000 to over $2.5 million. She was replaced by Robert Kidd, formerly the administrative director of Bigelow.
Developing EPSCOR, 1990-1992
The transition from Tanski to Kidd was smooth. The Centers for Innovation moved forward under individuals hired to staff them. The EPSCoR proposal effort advanced under REP and Shehata. In 11990, the NSF provided Maine with a grant of $1,220,000 for the 1990-92 period. This went to the institutions in the original award (the University of Maine, Bigelow Laboratory, and the Maine Geological Survey). The big difference was the fiscal agent was not the university, but the Maine Science and Technology Commission, and this time the State came through with matching money in the amount of $300,000 a year for two years.
As before, the fields supported were marine sciences and geology. As before, the work in marine sciences was considered acceptable, while that vis-á-vis both programs was a technically trained manin geology exemplary. Geology had the active leadership of a senior scientist, George Denton, who linked the work in Maine to an evolving new paradigm in the earth sciences called "global change." The Maine researchers studied certain aspects of this growing field as it was exemplified in their state. There were senior leadership, bright young researchers, and a sense of coherent direction. Also important, perhaps, was the fact that the work was concentrated in the university, and did not require sometimes difficult cooperation between institutions (Bigelow and the university) to mobilize a critical mass. In spite of various problems, there was progress, including positive results in marine sciences.
There was a strong core of Maine researchers in the geologic and marine sciences. The institutions used the money to help add able researchers from outside the state and acquire needed equipment. while it sometimes proved cumbersome in the university to mesh university with departmental priorities (as in tenure decisions for certain new faculty hires), these issues were largely resolved over time.
As a consequence, in 1992, the NSF provided Maine and the commission with a three-year (1992-95) EPSCoR Round III award of $4.5 million. The nature of the award entailed stress on the "clusters" approach, one which Maine had already emphasized. With more money, Maine was able to include more institutions. In addition to the university, Bigelow, and the Maine Geological Survey, there was Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory. This institution strengthened biological aspects of marine sciences work already being performed. Maine also began a new cluster, in the wood sciences. At the outset of Maine's EPSCoR work in 1980, the university had hoped to have activity associated with forestry as part of its package but had not succeeded. Now, in 1992, it was successful. Robert Kidd worked with Governor MeKernan and the legislature to include $1,000,000 per year in the bud get for the support of EPSCoR Round III. State legislative leaders, President of the Senate Charles Pray and Speaker of the House John Martin, wrote letters to the director of the NSF indicating their support for EPSCoR match. This effort increased state general fund support for EPSCoR to $1,250,000 a year.
Crisis and Response, 1992-1994
In 1992, even as the Maine Science and Technology Commission (MSTC) had successfully matched a third round of EPSCoR, a crisis gathered. It had various facets: personal, bureaucratic, and especially financial. In 1992, MSTC produced two long range strategic planning documents for the consumption of the governor and legislature. The first document was called a Vision" and the second "Maine's Science and Technology Plan: A First Step Towards a Productive Future." Both were lofty in rhetoric and the second quite specific as to the challenge ahead for Maine in building up its educational, science, and technology base and linking it with economic development and jobs. No fault could presumably be found with anything in the report, save MSTC's ambition in a state that in the early 1990s was in an economic tailspin. Staff members of the commission, along with other state employees, experienced extremely tight times in terms of salary raises and reductions in the agency's staff and budget. EPSCoR matching money was provided, albeit piecemeal, while the Centers for Innovation were adversely impacted by general fund reductions.
In late 1992, the governor's budget problems worsened and his budget proposal to the legislature created a crisis for the commission. The governor's budget included a reorganization, placing the commission under the Department of Economic and Community Development. There are those who believe that one reason the governor adopted this strategy was anger toward the commission, which had for a time employed an individual who was an adversary of the governor. Certainly, putting MSTC under a cabinet appointee would give him more control over the commission. Personal pique notwithstanding, the governor clearly desired to cease funding public-private entities like the commission in general, and to consolidate them in the regular bureaucracy. The department of Economic and Community Development no doubt was comfortable with the idea of having MSTC and its bud get submerged under its wing.
Whatever the reasons, the fact was that the very survival of the commission as a distinctive entity was now at issue. The board of the commission would be dismantled, along with the Research Excellence Partnership. The members of the commission reaffirmed, by majority vote, the importance of having an industry-led public-private partnership with budget authority over the programs of the commission. They voted to recommend to the governor that the commission be reconstructed into a Maine Science and Technology Foundation, becoming even more independent of the governor and line bureaucracy.
The debate now went to the legislature. The governor's proposed budget had recommended, in addition to folding the commission into the Department of Economic and Community Development, that all funding to two other public-private partnerships (the Maine World Trade Association and the Maine Development Foundation) be terminated. The Joint Standing Committee for Housing and Economic Development, co-chaired by Senator Chellie Pingree and Representative Rita Melendy, made a comprehensive counter proposal to the governor. The committee recommended to the Joint Standing Committee for Appropriations and Financial Affairs that all three public-private partnerships should be funded, and they further recommended that MSTC be reconstructed as a state-chartered foundation. The Housing and Economic Development Committee recommendation to the Appropriations Committee noted that the governor's proposal would jeopardize federal dollars, hurt the public-private partnerships, dilute the focus of the commission, and could hurt its recruitment of top people. Also, the committee noted that the transfer would not save any money.
Legislation was passed in 1993, as part of the amended state budget, transforming the commission into the Maine Science and Technology Foundation. A quasi- public/private organization, MSTF could receive funds from non-public as well as public sources. It could make investments and conduct fee-for-service activities. It kept its board of directors, whose members were appointed by the governor. Many of the same people who served with the commission now served with the foundation.
What this change meant for MSTF depended greatly on the ability of the foundation to take advantage of its new quasi-public, quasi-private status in getting non-state funds. Strictly state funds for the organization went down from $2.1 million to $1.6 million from FY 1993 to FY 1994. What the change meant for the governor became plainly manifest when the FY 1995 budget was revealed.
During the early 1990s, a variety of other federal agencies joined the NSF in sponsoring EPSCoR programs. This was at the behest of the state EPSCoR pro grams, who had hired a lobbyist on their behalf in Washington. All of a sudden, Maine was confronted with a number of new possibilities for federal funding. The commission, via REP had made decisions not to go after some agencies and to tar get others. One was the Department of Energy, which informed the commission about the same time it became a foundation, in October 1993, that it was going to receive a two-year $1.25 million DOE-EPSCoR award for genetics research. What made the DOE grant particularly welcome was that it would bring the prestigious Jackson Laboratory into the coalition the commission/foundation was trying to build of cooperating research institutions.
This grant was the good news. The bad news was that the DOE, like the NSF, required matching. The commission had acquired from the governor the promise he would provide matching money in his budget and legislative leaders had said that if the governor proposed it, they would vote for it. It was in part because of the evidence of "commitment" that the DOE was willing to provide funding. But before the DOE had actually provided its money, the governor, in early 1994, proposed a state budget without state matching funds.
The foundation, with its new sense of independence, was aghast. It was true budgets were tight and the governor was being forced to make trade-offs in a political setting in which "no new taxes" were possible. But he had proclaimed his interest in science- and technology-based economic development, and the foundation had a promise in connection with the DOE grant. Or thought it had promise.
The foundation yelled "foul," and commenced an overt political campaign to get the money. This was more difficult than the earlier action to avoid submergence within the state bureaucracy. Maine, it could be argued, was already doing a lot to match the NSF funds. Now, it was being pushed to match DOE money. The answer, of course, was that it was being pushed in the right direction.
The foundation took its case to the media, and editorial writers throughout the state came out on the foundation's side. The business community, through such groups as the Chamber of Commerce of Portland, also joined a lobbying campaign. Legislators who had never heard of EPSCoR and were only dimly aware of the foundation now were the focus of an attempt to reverse the governor's decision. The governor, who was not eligible to run again, found himself in an awkward position, made more awkward by his promise of support and evidence in writing of that promise.
Democratic and Republican legislators on key committees concerned with economic development saw an issue that was important to Maine and their own political careers. Even the senior Republican senator on the Appropriations Committee became an advocate of the matching money. It turned out that one of her constituents was the Jackson Laboratory. The result was that the legislature provided the funds and the governor went along.
This was an important victory for the foundation. It had used the DOE match to publicize the importance of science and technology for economic development to a much broader constituency in the state than ever before. There was one negative to this victory, however. The legislature indicated that some of the funds for the Centers of Innovation would have to be transferred to help provide additional money for DOE-EPSCoR. In a constrained budget, the trade-offs were going to be among programs within the realm of science and technology/economic development, not between this sector and other sectors, such as social programs. Still, the overall state support budget for Maine's Science and Technology Foundation did go up from FY 1994 to FY 1995: from $1.6 million to $2.3 million. With the federal FPSCoR money, the overall total was approximately $4.4 million.
Conclusions
The change process in Maine is still underway. The crisis may be past, yielding a patient who will recover and gain good health. Or it may be prelude to further problems, a kind of chronic case of vulnerable institutions and vulnerable programs.
The most likely prognosis is for guarded optimism. When the change process began, there was no committed actor (at least in EPSCoR) with the state's welfare as its interest. It is hard to say "who" was in charge of the original EPSCoR program. Was it really Bixler, or was it Bigelow? It was not the university, which actually was the financial manager (and which therefore could have asserted itself). The program fell between chairs, and the state government truly was not made part of a stable coalition of support.
Over time, events within Maine (the drive for industrial policy) congealed to create a new key actor or public entrepreneur. After various organizational transformations, it has emerged as the Maine Science and Technology Foundation. It has gone through a birth and growth phase and, since 1992, a series of tests that have strengthened it.
Along the way, it has attracted an ever larger group of constituents, first in the research community and more recently in the business and political worlds. Important in this respect is the university. In the early years of the Maine Science and Technology Commission, the university was regarded as a problem, with a president whose priorities were widely seen as more athletics than research. As of 1992, Fred Hutchinson, who had been part of the beginning of EPSCoR and had then left the state, came back as president of the University of Maine. A one time vice-president for Research, Hutchinson not only gave more priority to research generally at Maine, but also supported EPSCoR in particular. He made the research priorities put forward in the EPSCoR grant (which he inherited) his priorities for the University of Maine generally. Even though downsizing his university, he vowed he would protect the EPSCoR initiatives and build on them. The "problem" with the university had been non-commitment, or at least non-priority for EPSCoR, in the past, not now. what is ominous about this otherwise promising story of institutional development and growing support is the fact that the federal push of EPSCoR seems not yet to have yielded an institutionalized state government pull. The Centers for Innovation have little prominence in this story, although their potential merit is notable. There is a sense that there are two "product lines" in MSTF: the federal university-oriented EPSCoR line and the state's industry-oriented economic development line. If they have congealed into a symbiotic and mutually reinforcing science/industrial policy, it is not apparent. The fields supported are different and there is a sense of fragmentation. It may be that the DOE-EPSCoR grant will prove a major step toward integrating EPSCoR with the Centers for Innovation program. But that remains to be seen. The difficulties, in any event, are understandable. It is hard, indeed impossible, to consolidate and strategize when institutional survival is at issue, and one program is being bolstered at the expense of another.
Maine has yet to make "the decision" to compete in a serious way in the world of science, technology, and economic development. While any visitor to Maine yearns (along with Mainers) to keep Maine "Maine" and avoid the negatives of more industrialized societies, the fact remains that Maine cannot stay still. Maine is already victimized by an unguided change process. The old jobs are going and Maine will either decline economically ( and suffer considerable brain drain) or find new jobs on which to build. For the latter to happen, Maine needs at least one out standing research university, and there is little evidence that Maine is willing to back Its university with any lasting commitment.
There are various studies available about what Maine must do to advance. The missing link is an industrial policy backed by political will. Given the structure of Maine government, especially with a legislature now subject to term limits, the governor must supply stable political leadership.
There is much to be said for the Maine Science and Technology Foundation as an institutional mechanism. It has a good design, the potential to supply administrative momentum, and the potential to link universities, research institutions, industry, and government. But it can not function effectively without an environment of political support. That has to be supplied primarily by the governor and legislature, lest Maine be pulled down by unfavorable internal forces or apart by various federal EPSCoR agencies. Maine is in a period of transition in which a favor able future is possible, but by no means assured.
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