Sirti Wrestles With Identity Crisis, Future Mission Fledgling Institute Tries To Bring Its Goals, Objectives Into Sharp Focus

On paper, the idea sounds great.

The concept has such a good ring to it, in fact, that even though much of its development is still in the embryonic stage, the Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute has already played a significant role in the recruitment of several outside companies to Spokane.

The collaboration of the area’s universities and colleges in an applied research facility focusing on providing technological assistance to local business and industry is an impressive-sounding idea.

At some point, though, SIRTI must emerge from its identity as a wonderful concept, and prove its worth in practical application in the day-to-day life of the Spokane business community.

And Lyle M. Anderson says it’s his job to help it make that leap.

“I think there’s been a tendency for SIRTI, as there is for any young organization, to try and be everything to everyone,” says Anderson, “and when you do that, you only create confusion.”

Anderson was appointed interim director of SIRTI in January with the task of “identifying what it was going to take to institutionalize SIRTI, to make it a legal entity, an organizational entity, a community entity and so on.”

The original plan was to end the interim period in June, but, “We couldn’t do all we needed to do in four or five months, so the time period has been extended, and frankly I don’t know for how long,” Anderson says.

Anderson has had time, though, to sharpen the focus on what face SIRTI is going to present to Spokane.

If you are a business seeking help in polishing your business practices, in forging relationships with potential customers or other businesses, in drawing on the expertise of the local college and university communities, SIRTI stands ready to help.

With one big qualifier.

Your business must be keyed to technological development: coming up with a technological innovation that can be applied and brought to the point of a product offering.

“We are unabashedly saying we are in the technology business,” Anderson says. “We’re in the innovation and commercialization business.

“If you’re going to interface with SIRTI, you’d better have something on your plate that is going to lead to newly-generated wealth for our community.

“This is who we are, and we are aware that some aren’t going to fit.”

Going back to SIRTI’s roots

Anderson believes that SIRTI’s activities should revolve around the commercialization of technological innovation. And he bases that belief on SIRTI’s roots.

“SIRTI was conceived by the business community,” he says. “That doesn’t mean there weren’t strong interests in the higher education community. There certainly were.

“But the real impetus for the conception of SIRTI came out of the business mind. The business community had a very clear concept of what was needed here in terms of an applied research anchor for the community to develop new products, new companies and new industries.”

In 1987 and 1988, the Momentum organization sketched up the outline for SIRTI. That was the same period during which the United States was reformulating its priorities in terms of technological development.

Anderson says the Omnibus Trade Bill of 1988 sought to rebuild this nation’s global economic competitiveness. The legislation recognized that something had to be done about “the research innovation drain that was going on in this country, where we were doing basic research, getting it to the applied stage, and others were walking off with product development, commercialization and those kinds of activities.”

At that time, Anderson was at Washington State University as director of the Small Business Development Centers for the state of Washington.

“The rhetoric was that we need technology, and we’re going to force technology into the system,” Anderson says, “but the reality was they were leaving out the variable of the business development side of it, the commercialization side of it.”

Anderson thought that wedding the budding SIRTI concept with the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) concept could bridge that gap. So he convinced SIRTI developers to include an SBDC.

“So now we had the groundwork for a collaborative relationship between the business concerns that you have around technology development and the technical concerns,” he says.

Soon after he stepped into the interim director’s role, Anderson looked at another gap in SIRTI’s offerings. The institute was structured to provide assistance to established businesses in moving their technical innovations to the commercial stage.

“But much of the new-product development is going to happen at the small-business, even pre-business, pre-venture level,” he says.

So SIRTI has looked at Eastern Washington University’s business incubator program and absorbed it into the SIRTI concept.

“We took the idea of the incubator, and we changed it into the concept of incubation,” Anderson said. “We took it from the idea of providing space to providing a variety of support services for the development of that young business.”

Developing a consensus

Anderson says he has spent his career “walking between the business community and the education community, and I love playing the kind of catalytic role that brings these two incredibly powerful forces together.”

Specifically, he spent eight years in partnership with his wife in a small business, and the last 10 years as director of the state’s Small Business Development Centers.

That background, he says, has left him breathless with SIRTI’s potential. But for all that potential, he says, SIRTI’s future is still fragile if it takes the wrong paths and adopts the wrong identities.

Surveys show clearly, Anderson says, that a large segment of the Spokane business community doesn’t understand SIRTI and its mission.

So during the past six months, Anderson and SIRTI’s staff and SIRTI’s advisory council have worked at developing a consensus about what SIRTI should be and what its relationship to the business community will be.

Committees have been working on those concepts, and will meet in a retreat Sept. 18 and “develop a consensus around vision, mission, mandate, objectives and accountabilities, and set the direction, in concrete terms, for SIRTI’s future.”

That consensus will set the stage for SIRTI to emerge from this interim period of development and set it off down a more permanent path.

But Anderson already knows where he wants that path to head.

“Five years from now, I hope SIRTI will be perceived by the business community as a part of a research and higher education initiative that provides opportunities for Spokane’s citizens and businesses to grow, mature and develop without having to leave town,” he says.

“SIRTI’s future is inexorably tied to its ability to be a business partner - not just serve the business community - but to be a partner with the business community,” he adds.

As an institution, it must face realities about a harsher political funding climate than similar institutions have faced in the past. Its future must be based on successful results, not successful politics.

“If SIRTI decides that its future is in acquiring grants, for example,” he says, “and we organize our resource to acquire grants, we will not be able to sustain ourselves.

“There will not be enough money to do that.”

The generation of new products, new jobs, new capital investment, new wealth for the Spokane community is where SIRTI’s future lies.

“And if we get very far from that essential ingredient, SIRTI will not be a long-term player in this community,” Anderson says.

, DataTimes MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Have an opinion? Business people who would like to comment on the role they would like to see SIRTI play, can call the institute’s Mary Joan Hahn at 358-2007.