San Diegos Connect Takes Offensive, Sets Agenda for Stoking the Regions Innovation Economy
Summary
Now San Diego’s Duane Roth has some ideas for ways the regional technology community can try to do things differently.Roth, who is chief executive of Connect, the non-profit organization that helped create San Diego’s innovation economy, laid out some proposals embodying his ideas a few weeks ago, when I was out of town.So I sat down with him recently to discuss what he calls “five new initiatives in support of the San Diego innovation economy.” Roth contends that the single most critical factor that has contributed to San Diego’s rise as a regional capital of innovation are specialized research institutes—and he contends that we need more of them.Roth says at least 50 such institutes have been established within a mile of the University of California, San Diego, in the vaunted Torrey Pines zip code of 92037.As examples, Roth listed the five newest ones, all created in the past year or so: —The Scripps Translational Science Institute, created to encourage multi-disciplinary research, such as identifying genes that underline susceptibility to disease and conducting clinical research that will lead to the translation of such discoveries into new medical therapies.