As seen in this article, “As New Jersey looks for new ways to attract and retain high-paying jobs in a climate where seemingly every state competes for the same or similar companies, legislators and pro-business forces are heavily promoting collaboration between academia and industry as a way to attract investment and cut the time it takes to get a product or process out of the lab.
Increasingly, the state is offering tax credits and other incentives to encourage businesses to locate near universities. The result is an ‘innovation zone,’ where institutions of higher education lend research, facilities, and talent to neighboring companies, with the goal of reducing time to market — and time to profit.
Ted Zangari, a real estate attorney specializing in relocation and incentives and a board member of PlanSmartNJ, which released two of its own reports on innovation clusters and districts in the past year, is exuberant about the Economic Opportunity Act and the state’s new focus on collaboration.
‘We come at it in grand style,’ he said about the likely passage of some form of the act and the robust incentive packages it offers, ‘We’re a little late to the process but we’re going to leapfrog all the states with which we’re competing.’”
