When it comes to connecting with the corporate world, there are those who believe the University of Arizona has considered it another foreign language. And one the university hasn’t been speaking very well.

Nancy Smith is changing that.

As the UA’s new director of of corporate and business relations, Smith is helping to make the university more accessible to businesses, not only from within the Tucson region but from around the world as well.

Smith, whose career in sales, marketing and planning spans 35 years, found the disconnect between the university and the corporate world when she was the vice president of strategic services at Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities (TREO) working on the region’s economic blueprint that was first released in March 2007.

"In it, we found we had some issues with businesses connecting with the university," Smith said. "(The UA) needed a corporate person to help with that. They needed to speak the language corporations speak."

Before coming to Tucson a decade ago, Smith spent 25 years in sales, marketing and planning in the Los Angeles area. Besides her work at TREO, in Tucson she has been a business consultant and an instructor in the UA’s McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship in the Eller College of Management.

"When I came here two years ago, I really tried to look at the university from the outside and I found that it was fairly difficult to get in from the outside," she said. "A lot of things here were going great and they had built some fantastic relationships with companies, but we needed to help expand so we could form new relationships and further strengthen the ones we’ve developed."

Smith launched a Corporate and Business Relations Council comprised of UA staff and faculty that meets three times a year. Its purpose is to strengthen linkages between the university and the private sector. One of its first tasks was developing a list of seven strategic industry sectors that could partner well with the UA.

The seven are:

-Aerospace, defense and homeland security

-Bioscience and biomedicine

-Environmental sustainability and solar

-Space and optical science

-Information technology and information sciences

-Advanced materials and manufacturing technologies

-Agriculture

With companies relying more on universities these days — for partnerships and a source for potential employees — the UA’s relationships with businesses are changing and going beyond the lab, Smith said.

"They are sharing their long-term plans with us, they are looking for multidisciplinary engagements and want connections at the highest, strategic levels on both sides," she said.

An example is Raytheon Missile Systems.

"It’s been a great relationship and it’s getting stronger," said Bob Lepore, vice president of engineering for Raytheon. "They bring some advanced technologies and a diversity of thinking we might not have here."

Lepore said that is especially the case when it comes to long-term ideas.

"They are looking at the next generation, we tend to focus on the near-term internally, but we look at the long term with the university," he said. "Things like nanotechnologies and future technologies are what they get excited to look into."

With industry advisory councils within specific colleges, Lepore said the UA "has really taken this to the next level. We’re going to need a couple more years to grow, but we’re headed in the right direction."

Justin Williams, director of the Arizona Technology Council’s Tucson office, agrees with Lepore’s assessment and he is working in his own way to help further ties between industry and the UA.

"I’m a graduate of the engineering college so I have an attachment there," Williams said. "I want to engage companies in town to find out what their needs are and help fill them. What we don’t want, is a company needing something for too long, not getting that need met here and relocating elsewhere. This town can’t afford to be losing these types of jobs."

Williams has been meeting with the heads of companies and is often accompanied by a representative of the UA’s engineering college, including the college’s dean, Jeffrey Goldberg. to connect the company with the UA.

"These are the kinds of relationships we need between these two entities," Williams said. "I see the college of engineering very central to all the efforts of the UA."

Steve Turcotte, president of Advanced Ceramics Manufacturing, 7800 S. Nogales Highway, has worked many projects with the university and said he’s seen a shift in the UA to working more with industry in the last year.

"We just finished a big project for the Department of Homeland Security and the UA was a big sub on that," Turcotte said. "We’re working on another contract for the Air Force right now for high-temperature materials joining. So we are partnering with the materials lab to send in that proposal. They seem more focused on working with businesses within the local economy and that is a good sign for the future."

Internally at the UA, it is just as important for Smith to work with professors developing research as it is to help the companies.

"We have a very entrepreneurial culture here at the UA," Smith said. "That’s how what’s now Sanofi-Aventis in town got started, with professors who spun their research into a business. We have things in place to help them."

Smith also wants to make it easier for professors to work with companies.

Pierre Meystre, director of the B2 Institute at the Biosphere 2, has seen renewed interest in companies wanting to work with the UA at Biosphere 2 for a wide range of research.

"With the help of the UA Office of Corporate & Business Relations, we are currently in the process of developing a major and exciting collaboration with a major Arizona aerospace company," Meystre said. "But at the same time, the solar panels we use are of interest to mining companies."

Meystre said there are challenges as well as great opportunities to working with industry.

"Universities tend to be some of the most open environments around. Our major mission is to create new knowledge and to propagate it as broadly as possible," he said. "Industries, on the other hand, are in the business of making a profit, otherwise they won’t be around very long. This implies that they tend to be more secretive and, understandably, want to keep trade secrets, protect their work through patents, etc. It is not always easy to reconcile these two cultures. There can also be conflicts between the sometimes shorter time goals of industries and the longer time goals of university researchers and students."

UA President Robert N. Shelton has been impressed with progress.

"Nancy [Smith] has done such a great job facilitating and expanding our relationships so far," Shelton said. "It’s been a win-win-win for us, the companies and the students who get to work on these projects with companies and then potentially be hired upon graduation for that same company trained in a new technology."

He said the UA is continuing to work on issues involving intellectual property.

"It comes up more when you have a small company that has recently launched and they don’t have a lot of money and they want to partner with the UA," Shelton said. "Sometimes it takes too long to work out an arrangement and people get discouraged. We need to get to ‘yes’ or ‘no’ more efficiently."

Still, though, Shelton says his biggest concern is funding from the state.

"A powerhouse research university is essential to the state so you can bring more partnerships and bring more corporations," he said. "However, if the state pulls away its support of the research facilities, these programs will suffer."

To help counter that Raytheon is working with the UA in seeking a grant to build a hypersonic wind tunnel at the university.

"Spending cuts are a concern for us," Raytheon’s Lepore said. "As we look to hire and retain top talent, having a top research university is very important in attracting students to the university. We have people on each of their advisory boards constantly looking at how we can bring more research dollars in to help fill other research funding gaps."

The hypersonic wind tunnel is one potential solution.

"This way the UA can develop new technology in the fields of hypersonics and high-speed technology," Lepore said. "And Raytheon can partner for research with them for next generation products."

Looking to the future, the UA’s Smith said she expects relationships to get stronger and more relationships to develop.

She is in the process of developing a new website for her office that will show the research going on at the UA, except for projects that are to be kept confidential. To help companies get to information, the UA has redesigned its homepage and included a link labeled "business and industry."

"It’s not up yet, but it should be soon," Smith said. "A lot of information within that link will be information we had on the site, but just called it something that made sense to the university. It is just one more area where we are trying to speak corporate."

Biz Facts