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Editor’s note: This is the first in a four-part series on research at the University of Hawaii and its potential to drive the state’s economy. Bruce Stevenson, former CEO of Pacific Health Research Institute (PHRI), contributed to the research for this series.

• Day 1: An overview of our research
• Day 2: Faculties compared
• Day 3: State investments compared
• Day 4: Where UH stands

Gov. Neil Abercrombie and University of Hawaii President M.R.C. Greenwood have both made much ado about the potential of university innovation to drive Hawaii’s economy.

“Research programs at the university will play a big part in our economic recovery by bringing external dollars into our state and building innovative industries,” Abercrombie said in January during his first State of the State.

“Our university can and must support a multi-billion dollar industry for Hawaii in research, spin-offs and related services that supports employment for Hawaii’s citizens and fuels the state’s economy,” Greenwood wrote in a March op-ed for Civil Beat.

Civil Beat decided to evaluate where UH stands in comparison with institutions that drive their local economy the way Abercrombie and Greenwood say UH could. A globally competitive and commercially successful innovation community requires a vibrant and steady stream of novel, ground-breaking discoveries, some of which will funnel down into a smaller number of viable commercial applications. A dynamic innovation economy of the type Abercrombie imagines is impossible without strong research and discovery.

It’s true that some sources already count among the nation’s .

But a comparative analysis of UH and four mainland state universities indicates the distance UH has to go before it is considered the equal of universities at the center of their local economies.

We looked at two state universities that have already established themselves as economic powerhouses through their research and two other more modest state universities. Only four-year campuses were included in our analysis.

The (UW) and the (UCSD) are both considered world leaders in discovery and innovation. The (UVM) represents a state with a smaller population, about half the size of Hawaii’s, but with similar resources. We also included in our analysis the , which UH officials told Civil Beat they consider .¹

The mainland counterparts we selected all have medical schools, a critical source of funds and discovery for most research universities. The comparison begs a caveat, though: Like the rest of UH, the John A. Burns School of Medicine was founded with an emphasis on education, not research. That only began to change relatively recently. The schools we compared UH with are more effectively, sometimes dramatically so, using their medical schools as centers of biomedical research and discovery.

Among our findings:

• For every $100 million in state dollars, UH has two members in the National Academies, compared with 8, 12, 14 and 24 at the other state universities.
• UH receives 50 percent more per faculty member than Wisconsin from the state, but roughly the same as the University of California, San Diego.
• Health sciences research at UH lags all four institutions.

It should be noted that there’s no perfect, apples to apples comparison. What Civil Beat has done is try to unearth trends that indicate how UH compares with other institutions in relative terms.

Research at UH on the Rise

Greenwood told Civil Beat that UH’s research performance is remarkably good, considering the fact that the university was originally established primarily to serve the educational needs of the state, and not to break new ground.

“Only in the last decade or so has the Manoa campus joined the ranks of universities that not only transmit and develop knowledge, but create knowledge and transfer jobs and potentially businesses and opportunities to the state,” she said.

“If it looks like the state is investing more in us than some other states are, it’s a good investment and it’s paying off. And it will continue to.”

We compared the universities’ research productivity in the areas of publications, federal grants and faculty stature³ by normalizing to faculty numbers and state funding levels.⁴

Of UH’s annual budget, approximately $560 million² comes from the state’s general fund to UH’s central administration and its four-year campuses, where research and discovery traditionally take place.

The amount of research grants UH receives has grown significantly over the last 10 years, from $179 million in 2000 to $462 million in 2010. Adjusted for inflation, that’s double the amount in 2000.

And even while total national funding from the National Science Foundation decreased from 2009 to 2010, Hawaii’s share increased from 0.81 percent to 1.02 percent.

Finally, UH officials point with pride to an in the Chronicle of Higher Education that showed UH was one of six universities not in the prestigious Association of American Universities to bring in more federal research money than 19 AAU members.

Yet, even with all those example of success, we found that UH has a ways to go if it’s to become the center of innovation propelling Hawaii’s economy described by Abercrombie and Greenwood.

Tomorrow: Read more about how the quantity and quality of faculty research at UH stack up.