Tech investment | Catherine Renault leaves North Carolina to head Maine's Office of Innovation
As the new director of the state's Office of Innovation, Renault may be a fresh face in the halls of the DECD, but she says she's already "intimately familiar" with the state's innovation-based economy. That's because Renault, a lifelong summer resident of Boothbay, has participated in almost every annual evaluation of the state's public investment in research and development since 2000, first as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina — where she applied for and won the bid to conduct the study — then as a program director at North Carolina research firm RTI International.
Renault has watched Maine's R&D activity increase over the years. In 2003 and 2004, the state had the 10th highest rate of nonprofit R&D activity in the country, up from 48th in 1999. "Maine's been investing strongly [in R&D] for a state this size," she says.
Even so, Renault says more needs to be done. Maine's private sector still contributes much less to R&D than the national average, and the state ranks 50th when it comes to investment in university research.
The OOI was founded in 2004 to foster an innovation and technology-based economy in the state. The first director, Janet Yancey-Wrona, left the position last year to join a pharmaceutical firm in Southern Maine. Renault was hired to implement the state's first Science and Technology Action Plan, which was released at the end of 2005 and calls for the state to increase its total R&D investment to $1 billion by 2010 — up from its current level of roughly $430 million. Renault says a boost in R&D spending by the Legislature would help attract more investment from the private sector, a multiplier effect she says is critical to reach the $1 billion mark.
Renault hopes her experience in innovation-driven economic development will come in handy in her new role. Her career has taken her from Virginia, where she ran a business incubator before becoming managing director of Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology for most of the 1990s, to her most recent job at RTI International, where she focused on the role of universities in economic development and rural entrepreneurship — "two things," she says, "that are going to serve me very well in Maine."
Renault's settling into her new position — she's on a part-time basis until March 5 — but already she's asking the questions that will help her create synergies between her office and others in the DECD, such as the Office of Tourism and the Office of Business Development. "Where are the intersections? Where can we leverage what we're doing?" Renault asks. "I see them all integrated."
After working in several states and conducting research around the country, Renault is in a special position to appreciate the importance Maine places in R&D and its innovation-based economy. "I'm really excited about what Maine's been doing," she says. "The R&D community here has the support of the commissioner [of the DECD] and the support of the governor. That's not true everywhere."
The new job has also given her bragging rights. "A very good friend of mine has this job in North Carolina," Renault says. "He's jealous."
Still, she admits heading an office like hers in a rural state like Maine, which receives much less federal technology funding than states like North Carolina, will be a challenge. But it's one she says she welcomes. "Anybody can be successful in Research Triangle Park," she says. "But to do our kind of work in a place like Maine is way more fun because it's harder to do."
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