That means, the time to plant seeds for tomorrow’s innovation is now, when the global economy is shrinking, unemployment is rising and one of the world’s largest carmakers, General Moters, is about to restructure in the biggest industrial bankruptcy in U.S. history.

We also have to prepare the soil to make them grow in a park where we intend to reap science-driven innovation, said Robert Atkinson, founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Research Triangle Park benefited from the strides large corporations made in research and development. In the 1970s, the biggest companies dominated the generation of innovative technologies. But that has changed significantly in the past 30 years.

Today, large corporations are moving R&D jobs offshore, to lower-cost countries. Companies with fewer than 5,000 employees contribute more than 80 percent of the top 100 innovations. And science-driven job growth increasingly depends on collaboration that crosses borders and involves companies large and small as well as universities.

What does that mean for RTP? Atkinson will offer suggestions at the International Association of Science Parks conference in Raleigh this week.

Atkinson, who in 1989 received a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is one of the key speakers at the IASP conference, which is bringing more than 750 participants from about 50 countries to the Triangle. He spoke to Science in the Triangle in advance of his presentation Wednesday. Here is an edited version of the conversation:

Q: What should the Research Triangle area do to foster and tap science-driven innovations and create jobs for another 50 years?

A:The Triangle has largely focused on being a branch plant for R&D. The area has long struggled with becoming more entrepeneurial.

An institutional culture change is necessary at Triangle universities. Right now, the corporate labs are doing their thing and the universities are doing their thing. Scientists, institutions and the business community need to work much more collaboratively.

This is a leadership issue that must be tackled by the Triangle business community, political leaders and universities.

Q: Why is it important to address this issue now?

A: Downturns can be fertile periods for innovation. Higher quality startup companies tend to spring up during downturns than during prosperous times. Innovation is critical to the economic success of a region such as the Triangle.

Q: Can you provide examples of how other regions do it?

A: Silicon Valley has always been much more collaborative than the Research Triangle area.

In southern California, the University of California at San Diego is tapping the resources and experiences of a cluster of wireless engineering companies. Representatives of the companies help the university to interview job applicants for faculty positions. My God, what a radical idea.

In Ottawa, Canada, the Information and Communications Technology Council brings together members from companies, universities and federal labs to allign their ideas and needs and direct job growth.

The Internet is emphasizing how researchers work over where they work. To solve scientific puzzles increasingly requires more than one researcher, one lab, or one organization. And in the global recession government is trading places with industry in stepping up investment in research and development.

What does that mean for economic engines like Research Triangle Park? Established 50 years ago near three universities,  RTP attracted corporate research labs and startups first because of the available land and then because of the concentration of research and development going on in labs built on the land.

Anthony Townsend, a 35-year-old research director at the Institute for the Future, a think tank based in Palo Alto, Calif., offered some suggestions. Townsend is one of the key speakers at the International Association of Science Parks convention, which is expected to bring more than 750 participants from about 50 countries to the Raleigh Convention Center this week.

Townsend will base his suggestions on a 20-year forecast he has compiled for the Research Triangle Foundation, RTP’s landlord and manager. He spoke with Science in the Triangle in advance of his presentation Tuesday. Here is an edited version:

Q: What scientific areas will be likely hot spots over the next 20 years?

A: Research and development in the 20th century was dominated by physics. Biology will be the central source of scientific and technological breakthroughs in the 21st century. That includes the design of micro-organisms genetically engineered to, for example, make fuel and personalized medicine, such as stem cell therapy that harnesses the body’s own ability to heal.

Digital sensors that pick up vast amounts of data from every day life will require smart computing technologies to analyze the datasets for use in research from public health to civil engineering to marine biology.

Efforts to address ecological concerns will require technologies to track output of harmful carbon, manage the data and validate carbon offset claims. Ecological economics will be a huge area of R&D growth.

Q: How will scientists work to come up with breakthroughs?

A: To solve the complicated big scientific puzzles of the 21st century, research will be collaborative and interdisciplinary and will advance within networks aided by the Internet. If research parks want to remain economic stewarts, they must reinvent themselves and organize and coordinate resources on a regional basis.

RTP has already begun to do that by establishing a network with the other six research parks that dot North Carolina from Raleigh to Charlotte. And the Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences, a research institute in RTP, is establishing a partnership with China Medical Cities, an RTP-size medical park north of Shanghai.

Q: What’s the biggest challenge for scientific innovation?

A: Technology transfer at universities is busted beyond repair.

Universities used to be open in sharing information and industry used to focus on patents and staking claims. Now it’s the other way round. Universities’ unwillingness to take risks in managing intellectual property is creating an innovation bottleneck. As the U.S. government is pumping more money into R&D, university scientists will crank out more results. But the research results will not lead to more innovative technologies that industry can pick up and bring to market.

To better measure research production, at Triangle universities for example, an inventory should be done to track who does what and who collaborates with whom. Much of the information could be sucked out of the Internet.

More than 50 years ago, such an inventory was done to attract corporate research labs to RTP. It’s time for an update.

Purdue seized the grand opening of Quintiles Transnational’s new global headquarters in Durham to talk about a founder’s tax credit and small innovation research grants she said she wants legislators to pass during the ongoing session.

Quintiles Plaza, a 10-story-tall, environmentally friendly building befitting a company with nearly $3 billion in annual revenue, made for a good backdrop. Conceived in a trailer on the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill campus 27 years ago, Quintiles has become the largest contract research organization in the world. Of 23,000 Quintilians, as co-founder Dennis Gillings calls employees, about 1,700 work in the Triangle.

“There’s nothing that could have kept me away from this,” Perdue told a crowd of hundreds that had gathered for the grand opening. “This is the kind of company we want.”

Located at the gateway to Research Triangle Park, a North Carolina economic engine that was nothing but scrub pines and possums 50 years ago, Quintiles embodies the entrepreneurship that Perdue said she wants to foster with the proposed incentives. The tax credit, for example, would allow successful company founders to sell their stock without getting penalized for capital gains.

Especially biopharma research and nanotechnology are expected to spawn possible Quintiles of the future and North Carolina is dotted with research hubs in both fields from the Triangle to Charlotte.

As for Quintiles, the company that started as a small consulting business in 1974 grew quickly as pharmaceutical companies farmed out more and more of their drug testing. “We thought we hit it big time when we moved into a small house in Carrboro,” Gillings told the crowd at the grand opening.

Quintiles’ business continued to increase and the company has had a hand in the development of the 30 best selling pharmaceutical medicines and nine of the 10 best selling biotech drugs.

In 2006, about $25 million in state and local incentives convinced Quintiles to expand in Durham and move into a new  headquarters building. The expansion was projected to create 1,000 new jobs in the Triangle by 2012.

So far, more than 400 employees have been added, Gillings said. “We’ve come a long way, baby, from that trailer.”

The partnership with China Medical City, a RTP-size research park the Jiangsu provincial government is establishing about three hours north of Shanghai, also aims to bring Chinese investment and jobs to North Carolina.

The partners will create an institute for international drug development on the Hamner’s campus to focus on preclinical drug development and compliance with U.S. regulatory standards. New technologies that are validated on the Hamner campus will then be transferred to China Medical City.

Newsummit Biopharma, a China Medical City partner, will establish its North American business center at the Hamner. The contract research company has business relationships with other science and technology parks in China. It’s offices will be in the Hamner’s bioscience accellerator, which opened last year and is home to two startup companies: BioMedomics, a diagnostics company started by a Chinese-American scientist, and b3bio, a Duke University spinoff.

Atkinson, president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank, told members of the subcommittee about 18 months ago that the U.S. is losing more R&D jobs to competition abroad than it is gaining.

I came across the testimony transcript while researching key speakers at the International Association of Science Parks conference that starts June 1 in Raleigh. Atkinson, who has been affiliated with the Brookings Institution and was a Clinton appointee to a commission that looked at information technology’s effects on workers and communities, will address how research parks like Research Triangle Park, one of North Carolina’s economic engines, can summon their strengths to keep innovation and jobs at home.

That’s important for the Triangle for several reasons: About 700,000 jobs in the Triangle alone are R&D-related. State government is spending millions of dollars every year to boost the area’s biotech and pharmaceutical industry, which five years ago became an economic development priority. And while U.S. companies may benefit from moving R&D jobs to India, China or Russia – a business strategy known as offshoring – it won’t benefit the Triangle much, because RTP is home to so few corporate headquarters.

Atkinson backed his offshoring claims with plenty of statistics. Here are the most striking numbers he cited:

• From 1998 to 2003, U.S. majority-owned affiliates increased their R&D investments overseas by 52 percent. Total corporate R&D investment by U.S. and foreign firms in the U.S. rose 26 percent during the same time period.
• From 1999 to 2003, corporate R&D investments as a share of gross domestic product  fell 7 percent in the U.S. It grew by 3 percent in Europe, by 9 percent in Japan and even faster in China and India.
• From 2005 to 2007, R&D investments rose 4.9 percent in the U.S. and 8.7 percent in the rest of the world.
• A survey by the Industrial Research Institute, a leading professional organization for corporate R&D managers, found that 52 percent of respondents reported that offshoring R&D led to reductions in U.S. R&D spending or staff. The survey was published in 2006.
• R&D salaries in China are one-sixth of those in the U.S. An electric circuit engineer with a master’s degree and five years experience earns an average $18,000 in India, compared to $84,000 in the U.S., and the Indian engineer works 450 hours more per year than his or her American colleague.
• Incentives may be more attractive outside the U.S., whose R&D tax reductions ranked the 17th most generous in 2004.

Two years ago, I spoke with seven people who were involved in establishing one of North Carolina’s biggest economic engines in the mid-1950s. The interviews, which ran in the News & Observer, offered many interesting nuggets of information and a few surprises. But I was struck most by an old, black-and-white photo.

Taken from the air, it showed brush, grass and trees as far as the eye could see. That was RTP before three universities – Duke University in Durham, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and N.C. State University in Raleigh – a developer and state leaders pursued the idea to turn thousands of rolling acres covered with poor soil into a research park.

Back then, RTP promised to raise North Carolina’s per capita income, which was one of the lowest in the nation, stop the brain drain of college graduates and generate more tax dollars for state, county and local governments. A handful of recruiters worked their contacts to convince research-oriented companies in the Northeast and Midwest to expand their labs in North Carolina. Their efforts finally paid off in 1966, when IBM decided to open shop in RTP.

In 1959, the year RTP was officially opened as the second research park in the U.S., it was 4,400 acres. Three companies that had established operations employed fewer than 300. Of all the industries in the Triangle, only 15 percent were technology-based, new-line industries.

Today, RTP measures 7,000 acres and is one of 174 research parks in the U.S. More than 160 companies employ about 40,000 in the park alone. About half of the Triangle’s industry is high-tech.

Six more research parks have sprung up along I-40 and I-85 between Raleigh and Charlotte and the Triangle is one of the fastest growing areas in the nation.

Traveling on I-40, which didn’t exist in the 1950s, it’s easy to miss RTP, because most buildings are lower than the many trees surrounding them. The research park was conceived and planned during a time when America was moving to the suburbs and its layout reflects that. Now, we’re concerned with urban sprawl and traffic congestion. The Internet allows us to work from home or a coffeeshop. Countries like India and China, where labor costs are much lower than in the U.S., are competing with RTP.

The park itself has only about 530 acres left to develop. But some of the largest employers in RTP, such as GlaxoSmithKline and IBM, are scaling back. The challenges that RTP and other research parks will face in the future are among the issues that will be addressed at the International Association of Science Parks conference, which  starts June 1 at the Raleigh Convention Center.