University Corporate Council coordinates Rice’s contacts with business world

University Corporate Council coordinates Rice’s contacts with business world

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

Although many people know “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” not everyone realizes how that applies to university relations with the corporate world.

Marybeth Savicki is trying to change that.

	MARYBETH SAVICKI

Recently appointed director of corporate relations in Rice’s Office of Resource Development, she is continually developing her awareness of the whole and the parts.

“Faculty and staff might know what their own department or school is doing with a particular corporation, but many of them have no idea of similar efforts across the campus — and how they could get better results if they collaborated with others,” Savicki said.

She co-chairs the University Corporate Council, which provides a quarterly forum where representatives from the various schools, departments, institutes and centers at Rice can share information about their needs and outreach efforts. It also provides a forum where Savicki can share information about the needs of the corporate world.

“Corporations are expanding their definition of ‘corporate philanthropy,'” Savicki said. “Engagement on university campuses is moving from check-writing to leadership, collaboration and global efforts.”

A corporation’s dealings with Rice could entail recruiting students to work for them after graduation, interacting with faculty, sponsoring research, licensing the inventions derived from university research, getting their products onto campus and offering philanthropic support.

Faculty and staff who attend University Corporate Council meetings can learn about a program or area of research that a company is interested in being associated with and then offer suggestions on how a particular project or person in their department might be relevant to that company. Sometimes a combination of efforts from multiple departments and schools might be better suited to a company’s needs than a single department, and Savicki can orchestrate that collaboration.

“In the broadest sense, the goal of university-industry collaborations should be to enhance the public good while simultaneously satisfying the mission and objectives of each partner,” she said. “Both groups are collaborating more closely to arrive at the most efficient and effective methods of working together.”

Savicki said that as the era of holistic corporate relations evolves, many companies prefer to have a single point of communication with the university.

That makes sense to Wade Adams, director of the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology.

“If I contact a company about sponsoring some research at the Smalley Institute and find out that another institute at Rice has already made a similar request for support, it creates an awkward situation,” he said. “The council can help us coordinate these interactions.”

Gary C. Marfin, associate dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering, noted that corporations interact with Rice on many levels. “The value of the Corporate Council is that it gives us an opportunity to begin to understand the totality of a company’s overall relationship with the university,” he said.

Vice Provost for Research Jim Coleman, who co-chairs the council with Savicki, said discussions at the meetings can help Rice identify new corporate partners. “We have lots of problem-solvers across campus who concentrate on small pieces of problems. If we can group these research efforts together and share that with a company, they may see our strengths in a different light. In the end, the council gets everyone better coordinated and thinking together.”

A core group of deans and administrators expressed the need for the council in December 2007. Last June an executive committee of 20 faculty and staff members met to refine the group’s charge. Since then, the executive committee has been meeting quarterly to define university corporate relations policies and procedures and to handle various administrative issues.

The next quarterly forum will be at 2 p.m. April 15 in the Barnett Conference Room on the fourth floor of Allen Center. Erik Larsen, director of the Center for Student Professional Development, will discuss Rice’s vision for improving corporate relations in relation to recruiting. Savicki will demonstrate two beta versions of a new Web site created to improve campuswide information sharing about corporations and their engagement with Rice.

Faculty and staff who want to attend and/or offer suggestions about the council’s work should contact Savicki at msavicki@rice.edu or 713-348-4267.

For more information about corporate relations at Rice, visit www.rice.edu/ocfr. To subscribe to the Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations newsletter, contact Jessica Jones at jessicajones@rice.edu.