The opportunities that will be created from such a partnership, he said, will ripple out through the entire economy. With the creation of such an endeavor, Cal Poly would take its place beside more than a hundred other universities with research parks, including Stanford, Penn State, the University of Utah, the University of Texas at Austin, and Virginia Tech. They weren't connected enough, in a live way, to the university. Many others are forced to diversify into other functions, such as office, industrial or other mixed uses. In trying to determine reasons for success and failure, Bechtel identified two research park models, exogenous and indigenous.
Exogenous parks seek to attract large branches of existing companies' plants.
It is the indigenous model that Cal Poly will follow, said Schiebelhut. We want growth in business with minimum impact on the traditional infrastructure. Having examples of established successes and failures to study has been a boon, Haile said. One example is Penn State, which in 1994 built its park two miles from the university on 130 acres of university-owned agricultural land. With a regional economic development objective, the park first took an exogenous strategy.