Ralph Cicerone, chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, gushes about chipmaker Broadcom Corp.’s pending move to University Research Park next to the school.
“It’s part of the bigger picture that a knowledge-intensive company can interact with the university,” Cicerone said.
But the public enthusiasm belies a private truth about the research park: So far, its lofty goal of mixing technology companies and university researchers hasn’t realized.
The idea looked better on paper.
The research park, a venture of the university and The Irvine Company, was meant to mimic the success of other areas. Think Stanford Research Park near Stanford University, Research Triangle at the University of North Car-olina or even the area around the University of California, San Diego.
There, companies and universities have traded ideas and, in the case of Stanford, spawned technology giants such as Sun Microsystems Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co.
While Stanford is exceptional, UC San Diego has made a name for itself as a hub for the biotechnology research and collaboration.
“The biotech industry just started building around the university in facilities for research,” said Duane Roth, executive director of UCSD Connect, a group that works with companies and the university. “We didn’t really have a park.”
Since the 1996 opening of Irvine’s research park, it’s become a thriving office complex, but not a hotbed of hand-in-hand work between industry and academia.
“It hasn’t taken off as fast as possible,” said Tim Cooley, managing director of Cooley & Associates, an Irvine-based consulting firm, and former head of Partnership 2010, a group of leading Southern California business, government and education officials.
To be sure, the research park’s tenant list is impressive.
San Jose-based data storage products maker Quantum Corp. and Woburn, Mass.-based chipmaker Skyworks Solutions Inc. are the research park’s largest tenants.
Others include San Jose-based Cisco Systems Inc., Time Warner Inc.’s America Online and Intel Corp.
UCI is the third-largest tenant at the park with about 66,340 square feet of space.
As for collaboration, though, it doesn’t go much beyond companies tapping UCI for interns.
When asked about work between the university and research park tenants, Bill Parker, vice chancellor for research and dean of graduate studies at UCI, said ties aren’t as deep as he would like.
But, he said, “It’s part of the evolution of productive and meaningful interactions.”
No wonder Broadcom’s move is seen as having a sort of legitimizing effect.
Compared to the top four tenants at the park, Broadcom’s coming complex (due to be built in the next two years) is massive.
The plan is for 700,000 square feet of space in eight buildings. In all, Broadcom is set to expand its operations by more than 200,000 square feet in one of the largest office leases for Orange County.
The chipmaker now is in about 450,000 square feet in the Irvine Spectrum.
Plus, the move stands to bring UCI’s engineering school closer to its namesake benefactor, Broadcom cofounder Henry Samueli, who gave $20 million to the school in 1999.
Samueli also has given about $5 million to UCI’s medical school. He and Broadcom cofounder Henry Nicholas, who left the company in 2003, together gave $3 million to help build UCI’s Center for Pervasive Communications and Computing.
“I would disagree that it legitimizes the concept,” UCI’s Parker said. “The present companies legitimize the concept. This raises the bar to a new standard.”
The university has much in mind with regard to how UCI and Broadcom could work together.
“There are many types of collaboration,” Parker said. “One example is the licensing of technology to an existing company. Another type of collaboration involves joint research where the company provides half of the funds for a particular piece of applied research.”
Another case is where Broadcom or another company pays the university to do research for it.
“In that case, patentable material is licensed exclusively to the sponsor,” Parker said.
Then there are the more simple hopes. University officials dream of professors and students dropping in on Broadcom to see what’s cooking in the chipmaker’s labs. Likewise, they hope Broadcom researchers will spend time at the engineering school.
They also envision chance encounters between Broadcom workers and UCI professors and students at cafes and university quads.
“There still is something to be said for the chance meeting over at the university club,” Cooley said.
Broadcom’s involvement with UCI already is more than most other companies. But the chipmaker’s move might be more of a marriage of convenience than a need to be next to the university.
The company looked at several different locations, according to Tom Porter, senior director of corporate services for the chipmaker.
“We started with almost 19 and then a lot of them got eliminated,” he said. “We knew our requirement. We beat the bushes for everything. We got it narrowed down to five realistic locations. We knew we couldn’t wait five or six years.”
Broadcom narrowed down to two sites in Irvine, one in Tustin and another in Lake Forest, Porter said.
One desire was to be closer to an airport. If an airport would have taken wings at the former El Toro Marine base, the company would have considered locating in a bigger facility right next to it, Porter said.
“We ship product for North America out of here,” he said. “If that was going to be an international airport, it might have had an effect.”
Being next to UCI does have its appeal, Porter said. The company is interested in a higher profile site, he said.
“Being adjacent to a university has that ambiance of an academic environment,” Porter said. “We also get the visibility.”
