How R&D Collaborations Drive Regional Growth

Vice President of Corporate Engagement and Strategic Partnerships Grace O'Sullivan reveals how ASU’s interdisciplinary R&D partnerships drive innovation and strengthen Arizona’s economy. She describes collaborations that help companies “see around corners,” from early prototyping to long-term technological breakthroughs. With major investments coming into the state, including a partnerships with TSMC, she highlights how academia can help build regional innovation ecosystems.

So companies like to work with us to see, you know, what's coming ahead. And we can prototype ideas here in our innovation zones and in our labs that can be prototyped before it goes into production.

So that's a real value of why companies want to work with ASU in terms of research. We have faculty experts from all different disciplines that also work together in an interdisciplinary way. So, for example, a planetary scientist also works with an industrial engineer coming up with new solutions if you're developing a device for example, you can have an industrial design student or faculty member working with a nurse practitioner.

So the regional impact, and especially in semiconductors right now, since there's a resurgence in the greater Phoenix area, the collaboration between industry and the university is key. So I'll just use, for example, that we've partnered with our state and local officials to attract TSMC or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to Arizona. And that resulted in the largest foreign direct investment in the entire United States history.

So huge ripple effects in the sense that we a one team with our local partners, with our utility partners to go out and attract these big deals, and once they come here, of course, then we work day and night to set up a what I like to call a 100 year partnership. How do we build that foundation so that we can work together for decades and decades into the future in terms of workforce development, advancing R&D, sharing facilities.

And so I think on the economic development side, we're really seen as having a seat at the table to leverage all of our assets at ASU to drive that local and regional economic development. So we have people, we have core facilities, advanced equipment, all of these convening powers that we bring to bear when we say we really work together as one community, enhancing the innovation ecosystem and the innovation ecosystem really is comprised of so many different parts.

You need the large industrial partners. You need an incredible, robust research university. You need the startup community. You need investors. So all of these puzzle pieces coming together, working together to advance innovation. And I think Phoenix has that special sauce.