Doubling Down

UMass Amherst has always been an economic engine for the region, and officials there want it to be even more of a force.

Tony Maroulis says UMass Amherst has always been focused on regional economic development, and it has always been an economic engine within the 413 and often well beyond, from its own large workforce to providing interns for area businesses, to concepts that are taken from its labs to the marketplace.

But now, the flagship campus of the state university is … well, let’s call it sharpening and broadening that focus, said Maroulis, executive director of Community and Strategic Initiatives for the university.

“It’s an emphasis on economic development that we perhaps haven’t put on it in the past,” he explained, referencing an announcement by UMass Amherst Chancellor Javier Reyes at the university’s annual Community Breakfast late last month — specifically, the launch of an initiative to leverage the full breadth of the university’s expertise, talent, innovation, and partnerships to spur job creation, entrepreneurship, and community revitalization, as well as workforce and small business development locally, regionally, and across the state.

“As the state’s flagship public university, UMass Amherst has a responsibility to serve as a catalyst for economic development at the local, regional, and statewide levels,” Reyes said at the breakfast. “Embracing this responsibility creates important opportunities for programming, analysis, and collaboration that can foster more inclusive, resilient, and innovation-driven growth across the Commonwealth.”

When asked about the initiative’s goals, how they will be addressed, and how success will be measured, Maroulis started by saying virtually everything the university does has an economic development component.

“Whether it’s our sporting events, which have an economic impact on the community, to the construction on our campus, to the graduates we place in the workforce — all of that is economic development,” he said. “What the chancellor is interested in us doing at this particular time is being a more active participant in the economic development efforts of our local communities, our region, and also the state.

Javier Reyes

“As the state’s flagship public university, UMass Amherst has a responsibility to serve as a catalyst for economic development at the local, regional, and statewide levels.”

“This means being a more visible player in these conversations that happen in all three places,” Maroulis went on, “and contributing with our expertise and with the faculty and staff, researchers, and students that we have here in that economic development discussion.”

Elaborating, he said Reyes has essentially challenged the campus community to “wake up thinking about economic development, how we impact those three spheres — local, regional, and state — and how we can increase that impact.”

Ambitious Goals

Overall, the announced initiative, to be guided by an executive committee consisting of senior campus leadership, will have several principal goals, including:

• Collaborating with communities to address challenges and opportunities around housing, healthcare, transportation, and services to overall infrastructure;

• Advising university leadership on strategies, partnerships, and investments that expand economic development impact with local, regional, and statewide focus;

• Identifying opportunities for university collaboration with industry, government, nonprofits, and community organizations.

• Providing input on and supporting the growth of university initiatives encouraging workforce development, entrepreneurship, innovation, and applied and translational research;

• Offering recommendations on policies, programs, and practices that promote resilient, innovative, and inclusive economic growth;

• Driving investment to the region and across the Commonwealth;

• Supporting strategic initiatives critical to the Commonwealth’s future;

• Creating talent pipelines for study, internships, and employment for the region and the state; and

• Cultivating research capacity with economic development priorities.

Assessing this list, Maroulis said there are many things the university is already doing within these various realms.

Examples include the recent announcement that the university will partner with Baystate Health to create SHINE: Strengthening Healthcare Innovation through Nursing and Engineering. Funded with a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the initiative will establish the nation’s first graduate training program designed to combine nursing’s hands-on patient care with engineering’s technical knowledge.

Tony Maroulis

“Our workforce development career pathways work … we do that locally, regionally, and statewide. We want to create deeper engagement with industry so there’s more opportunity for students to have pathways to jobs post-graduation and to have access to internships.”

The goal moving forward will be to simply ramp up such efforts. This will be the case with issues as disparate as workforce development and the state’s housing crisis.

“Our workforce development career pathways work … we do that locally, regionally, and statewide,” Maroulis said. “We want to create deeper engagement with industry so there’s more opportunity for students to have pathways to jobs post-graduation and to have access to internships. These are things the chancellor would like to see us do even better than we do it now.”

As for the housing crisis, the those involved with the initiative will look at how the university can better work with municipalities on land use reform and infrastructure development to develop critically needed new housing.

That housing would benefit the university, its staff, and students, but also the region’s business community by giving their workforce access to more housing — specifically more affordable housing.

Other issues to be addressed include transportation and childcare, he went on, adding that there are barriers to opportunities for university students and area residents alike.

“These are the kinds of issues that we will be engaged in, both as a thought partner and sometimes as a thought leader, and as an advocate with other organizations and agencies in the region that are working on these kinds of issues.”

Collective Engagement

One key to the initiative’s success will be its council, made up of officials from across the university, including representatives of the Isenberg School of Management, the Berthiaume Center, the Mount Ida campus, Government Relations, the Donahue Institute, the Massachusetts Small Business Development Center, and the Institute for Applied Life Sciences.

The council will work with a leadership team — Maroulis; Sundar Krishnamurty, vice provost for Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Creativity; and Carl Rust, assistant vice chancellor for Corporate Engagement — to recommend priorities and track progress.

This will be an ongoing initiative, meaning it’s not necessarily a five-year or 10-year plan, said Maroulis, but one that will seek some “quick wins,” as he called them, but also focus on the long term.

When asked how success will be measured, he said there will be several metrics and yardsticks, everything from growth of the current $2.9 billion in direct and indirect impact on the state’s economy to increases in local purchasing, to the number of startups created at the university and the jobs that result.

“The chancellor believes that we have a responsibility to serve as a catalyst for economic development,” he went on while summing up the initiative, adding that the university has always been that.

The mission moving forward is to take it to a new, more impactful level.