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Monday, 23 June 2008 |
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Page 2 of 3
Rules of attraction
At the end of March, AT&T announced a multi-year partnership with CU-ICAR that included $1.5 million earmarked for infrastructure and $1 million to upfit the AT&T Auditorium at the Campbell Graduate Engineering Center. AT&T also created an endowment to ensure that technology remains up to date.
This announcement is another feather in the cap of CU-ICAR, and the realization of a dream that Christian Przirembel, vice president for Research and Economic Development, says began in the summer of 2000. “I had the good fortune to be involved in this from the beginning when President Barker asked the question of how can Clemson get a research and development facility located in Greenville,” he recalls.
What followed was a fortuitous melding of many components.
Looking back, Clemson President Jim Barker says that CU-ICAR “brings together the academic and research strengths of a research university, the public support of state government and the private support of an existing strong industry in the region. None of these entities could have created CU-ICAR without the involvement and support of the other two. But together we present a powerful statement to the automotive industry and to the world about what Clemson University and South Carolina have to offer. To date, CU-ICAR accounts for $225 million in public and private investment and 500 new high-paying, technology-oriented jobs at the CU-ICAR.”
Przirembel describes CU-ICAR’s development in step-by-step terms: Identify academic strengths, locate a property to be anchored by the academic unit surrounded by buildable land to attract private sector investors; design a campus that invites interaction, not just in meetings but informally; put forth a dedicated effort to recruit partners. Przirembel says that AT&T is the latest addition to a corporate roster that includes Timken, Sun Microsystems, Mazda and two Tier One suppliers among others.
The campus seemed literally to spring up overnight, and now other projects across the Upstate are following its model.
Global impact
Both Barker and Przirembel stress that Clemson is committed to seeing these current projects through before embarking on others, while Geolas admits, “CU-ICAR is a long-term economic development project that is much further ahead of where I thought we would be at this point. While we are local, we are competing globally. National economic conditions, global incentives, funding and research will have a lot to do with how quickly we see development. We certainly hope the next 10 years will be as promising as the first four have been.”
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