The Innovation Town Hall at the University City Science Center last week started and ended with powerful testimonies of the power of innovations that successfully make the journey from university labs and minds to the marketplace.

Glen Gaulton, the executive vice dean and chief scientific officer at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, opened the morning's first panel, "The Case for Translational Research," by talking about a close friend on the Perelman faculty who was diagnosed with stage four metastatic lung cancer with a one-year survival rate of less than 1 percent. He recalled sitting in the doctor's office with her when she heard the news that her lung cancer was untreatable. Three years ago, thanks to a timely clinical trial initiated along with Pfizer at both Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn, her treatment is less costly and more effective and she is healthy and happy, running a 25-person lab.

"When you do (innovation) right, it saves somebody's life," says Gaulton.

Or sometimes, it saves a city. That's what audience member Youngjin Yoo, a Temple University professor of management information systems at the Fox School of Business, wanted to talk about near the close of the second panel, "Public-Private Partnerships and Innovation Intermediaries." Just last month, Yoo was part of Temple teams that were approved for $700,000 in federal grants toward forming an Urban Apps and Map Studio, an interdisciplinary effort that will build apps to address urgent human needs in urban environments and launch new businesses around those apps right here in Philadelphia.

"We can't transform the university into a training ground for the next Steve Jobs," says Yoo. "What we're building is not a company that produces software, but a platform to produce those companies and organizations. This is a generative process, highly scalable and at the same time highly flexible."

Collaboration and new approaches were among the hot topics at the Innovation Town Hall, held on Oct. 17 at the perfect location -- the Science Center is the country's oldest and largest research park, currently has 30 tech-based companies in its Port Incubator and has created 15,000 jobs and $9 billion in economic impact in Greater Philadelphia. Separate panels were held inside the Center's new Quorum facility as part of a series of Town halls conducted by the U.S. Department of Commerce's Innovation Advisory Board. Science Center President and CEO Stephen Tang serves on the 15-member Board. The driving question was "Is innovation scalable?"

The opening panel featured Gaulton, Temple University Senior Vice Provost for Research and Graduate Education Kenneth J. Blank and New Spring Ventures General Partner Zev Scherl. They talked about reducing regulations and obstacles to enhance the entrepreneurial spirit, increasing funding opportunities and incentivizing clusters among institutions and entrepreneurship among scientists and researchers.

"The Department of Commerce is pushing entrepreneurship, the National Institutes of Health are pushing the research aspect, so being able to get joint programs would play upon that theme of collaboration and would be scalable and transferrable," says Blank.

The day's other panel featured University of the Sciences President Emeritus Phillip P. Gerbino, Select Greater Philadelphia President and CEO Tom Morr, and Fujirebio Diagnostics President and CEO Paul Touhey. Their discussion touched on doing more with less and working across disciplines, aligning skills with industry needs and rewarding entrepreneurial activity in academia.

"I'd give every PhD graduate a green card with their diploma," says Morr. "If they were educated here, we had ample time to determine whether they're a security risk for our country. It seems to me we ought to develop a path to citizenship that comes through education."

Tackling a new generational challenge with maps and apps
Similarly, Yoo wants to develop a path to urban problem-solving through the far reaches of academia and entrepreneurship. Recent funding at Temple includes $500,000 from the U.S. Economic Development Administration and $200,000 from the National Science Foundation (the latter is for related research to build a test bed for a next-generation urban wireless network).

Yoo and his team envision the Urban Apps and Maps Studio as a hub for creating software applications, maps and data sets to solve Philadelphia's most pressing challenges in public education, transportation, public health and personal finance. That also includes creating technology based companies and jobs. First, Yoo's team will look to foster collaboration by connecting our city's most tech-savvy citizens – high school and college students – with urban entrepreneurs, community and civic organizations, government and faculty to develop and commercialize the studio's apps.

"The idea is to engage the people who live in the city and encounter these challenges on a daily basis," says Yoo, who will be touching on these themes as a speaker at the upcoming TEDx Philly event on Nov. 8 at the Temple Performing Arts Center. "(They) often have insights into how to solve these problems but don't have the means to implement those ideas."

Yoo's innovation is in developing a platform, not another set of solutions or institutions, to drive problem-solving with an economic development slant. At least a dozen Temple departments and groups are contributing to the effort. The platform includes a citywide design competition, held for the second consecutive year, that will take the best mobile and web-based apps to solve problems in neighborhoods and forward them to a series of hackathons organized by Code for America fellows and other tech organizations. The competition, set for Feb. 13-17, will also include local startups and individuals, who will help develop prototypes that can move forward into the incubating process and be presented to the venture capital community. The theme is North Broadband, and students will be exploring North Broad St.'s challenges in the hopes of helping them with digital solutions.

Yoo sees a narrative much larger than our tri-state pocket of the world. While it's easy to point to the core challenges faced down by previous generations -- world war, Communism -- it is not so readily apparent what great challenge requires the full attention of today's generation. Yoo sees cities, now home to roughly half of the world's population, as the center for many of our most pressing challenges, as well as some of our most effective solutions.

"I say to (my students) ‘It is your city. The city we live in today is your biggest generational challenge,' " he says.

JOE PETRUCCI is managing editor of Flying Kite. Send feedback here.

Photos:
University City Science Center
Yougnjin Yoo, Temple University