The UB Alliance includes The Center for Industrial Effectiveness (TCIE) and the Office of Technology Transfer Services, as well as the Strategic Partnership for Industrial Resurgence (SPIR) and UB Greater Regional Industrial Technology (GRIT) programs.

The reorganization of the university's economic-development and industrial-outreach activities is the result of UB efforts to make economic development the cornerstone of its public-service mission, said Mark Karwan, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and chief executive officer of the UB Alliance.

In forming the alliance, UB is "making economic development and industrial outreach one of the priorities of the university," agreed Rebecca Landy, chief operating officer of the alliance and executive director of TCIE.

According to the organization's mission statement, the objective of the alliance is "to improve the business practices and modernize the products, processes and facilities of our (UB's) business partners, help them utilize technology and commercialize university-developed inventions. The University-Business Alliance will be in the forefront of utilizing resources, brokering services and developing partnerships within UB and across the community, on behalf of our industrial partners."

The alliance will create a "natural, first place of entry" for companies seeking to work with the university and "expedite access into and out of the university" for potential industrial partners, as well as members of the university community who want to work with these partners, said Landy.

Karwan described the alliance as a "one-stop-shopping kind of approach" to economic development, whereby potential industrial partners can make one telephone call to the university and receive the assistance they need.

This approach prevents customers from being "bounced around from department to department or school to school" looking for information and assistance, Landy added.

The alliance also will provide industry access to university-developed inventions, ideas and expertise in world-class manufacturing and management practices, as well as proactively broker university intellectual property with an emphasis on companies that have a significant New York State presence.

The alliance will "aggressively pursue partners in government and industry to help economic development at the state and federal levels," Karwan noted.

"We are continuing to grow our relationship with governmental and industrial partners throughout Western New York and New York State, and are becoming a significant participant in Western New York partnerships for economic development," he said.

The programs and organizations being merged into the alliance already have proven track records in economic development.

The Center for Industrial Effectiveness, formerly based in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and affiliated with the School of Management, aims to motivate and help industry to develop people, use technology, improve business practices and modernize products, processes and facilities. Since its inception in 1987, it has worked with 350 firms in Western New York and has been credited with creating or saving 5,000 jobs with companies ranging from multinationals like General Motors and Pratt & Lambert to small operations with less than 40 employees.

TCIE administers both the SPIR and GRIT programs.

SPIR, a cooperative effort of SUNY's graduate engineering programs at UB, Stony Brook, Binghamton and New Paltz, is aimed at bolstering the state economy by promoting the transfer of knowledge from university to industry and providing consultation, research facilities and resources for industrial restructuring. During the past fiscal year, it contributed to the retention of more than 1,000 manufacturing jobs and the creation of more than 800 new ones.

UB GRIT is a two-year demonstration project to assist area businesses in developing new products in cooperation with universities from the Buffalo-Rochester-Syracuse region. Its aim is to provide the research-and-development expertise that small businesses need, but usually can't afford, to continuously develop and improve their products in order to stay competitive in the domestic and global marketplace and maintain American jobs. Since the project began in 1995, a total of 14 product-improvement projects have been conducted, or are in the works, by the consortium.