Mary Holz-Clause has her hands full as the University of Connecticut’s first economic development director.
With more than a billion dollars slated to be invested over the next few years in bioscience and technology centers in Farmington and Storrs, UConn is entering a critical stage in its growth as a major research institute.
Holz-Clause will oversee both projects. But her new role goes beyond infrastructure and academic development.
Her main job is jobs. That means creating and sustaining jobs from the research and technology created by UConn faculty and students and more closely tethering the school’s relationship with the private sector, where UConn has had a spotty track record in recent years.
It’s a directive straight from Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and UConn President Susan Herbst, who both envision UConn becoming a major source of future job creation in the state through its technology transfer role.
Holz-Clause, who is now six months into her new job, said it all starts with developing an entrepreneurial culture within the university.
“One of our top priorities is to enhance our entrepreneurial ecosystem,” Holz-Clause said in a recent interview. “We need to support student and faculty entrepreneurship so that we can take ideas from research and commercialize them into a business plan and eventually a business.”
Holz-Clause comes to UConn with diverse background.
The mother of three daughters has been in economic development for more than three decades, on both a national and international stage.
Most recently she served in an economic development role at Iowa State University as associate vice president for extension and outreach. There, she oversaw a $95 million budget and 700 employees.
She focused a lot of her efforts on agricultural development, which is one of the primary industries in the Hawkeye State. Her father and husband have been prominent farmers in Iowa so the industry runs deep within her family.
Dr. Jack Payne, who hired Holz-Clause into her associate VP position at Iowa State, said he was impressed by her ability to build new programs, establish local, national and international alliances and raise money.
On the international front, she has established economic development programs in Nigeria and Uganda and has worked with universities and organizations in India, China, Turkey and Russia on agriculture development.
Payne, who now works at the University of Florida, said Holz-Clause was also a “prolific” grant writer who was able to bring in significant research dollars, which is one of the key roles she will take on at UConn.
Any major research university must be able to leverage local, state, and federal government and private sector funding to stay relevant. Those dollars also lead to new jobs. Within Holz-Clause’s 20-page resume, five pages list dozens of grants — worth millions of dollars — she has been able to secure over the last 12 years.
One of her best accomplishments, according to Payne, was starting up Iowa State’s Value Added Agriculture Program, which assists Iowa farmers in improving the efficiency of their businesses and helping them adapt to modern industry trends and technology. Payne said Holz-Clause was able to get the program off the ground on a “soft budget,” and build it into one of the key components of Iowa State’s economic development efforts.
Holz-Clause also stared an Agriculture Marketing Resource Center at Iowa State, which serves as a virtual information center with business information and development tools for farmers. Annually, the site is averaging 50 million hits a year.
“Her knowledge of economic development from an agricultural sense was impressive,” Payne said. “Her skills are in leadership, getting people together and raising money. People like that are valuable.”
At UConn, Holz-Clause’s focus will shift from agriculture to building on core industries in Connecticut including bioscience, technology and advanced manufacturing.
She said one of her primary focuses is continuing to build up UConn’s tech transfer efforts. The school has invested millions of dollars in new labs and research and incubator space over the last decade with the hopes of better supporting student and faculty entrepreneurship and attracting top research talent.
The infrastructure is or soon will be in place, Holz-Clause said, so the primary challenge now is changing the philosophical approach among students and faculty so they think like entrepreneurs.
UConn pulls in about $200 million in research funds annually, but state officials want to see that number double in the coming years. That will only happen if the school’s tech transfer efforts ramp up, Holz-Clause said.
To do that, the school will have to more closely collaborate with the private sector and investors to produce research and technology that the market needs, Holz-Clause said.
“It’s not about inventing things just for the sake of invention,” Holz-Clause said. “We need to create things that the market needs.”
Holz-Clause said UConn is not as flexible and nimble as businesses want the university to be and needs to be able to execute projects or partnerships on a faster timeline.
“We need to ensure that the tech transfer process is speedy and transparent,” Holz-Clause said.
Getting students more involved through business plan competitions is also important as well as creating a central portal that links people to UConn’s role as an economic development vehicle, Holz-Clause said.
But the spotlight will shine most brightly on the programmatic leadership and direction she provides on two major projects.
Lawmakers are wagering billions of dollars over the next few years to try to make the state a major player in bioscience. That includes the $864 million “Bioscience Connecticut” initiative at the UConn Health Center in Farmington and the $170 million technology park to be built in Storrs.
The state also invested $291 million for Jackson Laboratories to open a genomic research center on the UConn Health Center campus.
All of those projects will require private sector participation to be successful, Holz-Clause said. The UConn tech park, for example, will eventually include multiple buildings and space for business incubators and individual companies to move their operations there.
The idea, Holz-Clause said, will be to have companies leverage UConn’s research brainpower to create a tech cluster. That means the school has to establish relationships and collaborate with businesses to make them feel like it’s a wise location to move their company.
It’s Holz-Clause’s job to make that happen.
