Before "Looking Ahead" I'd like talk about the past briefly.  Clusters are about history and people as well as about economics, competition and strategy. Michael Gorman of St. Paul Venture Capital  mentioned something recently about paying attention to things that are "in the soil."  His remark reminded me of people and ideas I've written about that sprang from the Minnesota soil. Last Wednesday I got a call from an executive at Immunex Corp. in Seattle - which is where you end up if you follow that proposed route for a transcontinental railroad from St. Paul westward.  He said he had read my column about the collaboration between Charles Lindbergh and Alexis Carrel at the Rockefeller Institute in the 1930s, and that his "jaw dropped“ when he read it. Lindbergh met  with Carrel, the world's greatest surgeon and a Nobel laureate, after learning that his sister-in-law was suffering from heart disease.  He couldn't accept what he was told about open-heart surgery being impossible.  Carrel agreed to work with him.  A few years later the "Lindbergh Pump" made its debut with much fanfare, including a cover story in Time magazine in July 1938.  It was not a heart-lung bypass system at all, but a perfusion pump for keeping animal organs alive outside the body so Carrel could study them. What really got Immunex's attention though was my speculation about what Charles Lindbergh might have done if he had had molecular biology as the chief technology of his youth instead of "Maria," the family's Model T.  He died in 1974, the year recombinant DNA technology made its debut. In May, Lindbergh's grandson Erik will attempt to follow in his grandfather's flight path to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the transatlantic flight and, as Erik put it, to honor his grandfather's  legacy of innovation.  It is possible only because of Erik's near miraculous response to the blockbuster biotech drug Enbrel, made by Immunex.  He has suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for 15 years and could barely walk until he started taking Enbrel about a year ago.  When he sets off in May for his solo flight in a single engine plane, just like his grandfather he will not be carrying a parachute.  Too heavy.  But he will have a supply of Enbrel. His grandfather also carried medicine in the cockpit of the Spirit of St. Louis.  He had one of Henry Wellcome's little "medicine chests" of compressed medicine's called tabloids.  All the explorers of the time carried  these chests on their expeditions, compliments of Wellcome.  Henry Wellcome was the founder of Burroughs Wellcome.  He grew up in Garden City just south of Mankato (the southern most blue star).  He worked in his father's drug store on Main Street during the period after the Civil War.  He always had his nose in his uncle's anatomy books.  He uncle was a surgeon and took Henry to meet a friend of his in Rochester, William Worrall Mayo.  Dr. Mayo put Henry to work with his sons William and Charles at the drug store beneath his office, tutored him in physical chemistry, and later sent him off to pharmacy school. In 1880 Wellcome and his partner founded their company in London, and  in 1894 Wellcome established the his Physiological Research Laboratory.  In that act he laid the scientific foundation for the modern pharmaceutical industry.  Anyone taking a prescription drug since that time, including Erik Lindbergh, owes something to Wellcome's passion for science and medicine.  His legacy is also the Wellcome Trust, the largest biomedical research philanthropy in the world with an endowment of $22 billion and the chief funder for the UK's participation in the Human Genome Project. The reliable cardiopulmonary bypass system that Charles Lindbergh sought to save his sister-in-law came into being not in the Princeton - New York corridor where he built the Lindbergh Pump but just a hundred miles or so downstream from his boyhood home in Little Falls (the middle star) -- at the University of Minnesota Hospital.   It was called the helical reservoir bubble oxygenator.  It was invented by Richard DeWall and C. Walton Lillehei. The cluster of talent that drove the revolution in surgery here in the 1950s needed someone unique to channel all the that creative energy.  That someone was Owen Wangensteen, a farm boy from Lake Park (upper left star). Wangensteen was chief of surgery from 1930 to 1967 and was himself was an inventor of note.  His suction device for treating intestinal blockage, the "Wangensteen tube, " was a life-saver for hundreds of thousands of patients.  In 1983 he was inducted into the Minnesota Inventors Hall of Fame. In September we will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the world's first successful open-heart operation.  It was done at University of Minnesota Hospital by F. John Lewis assisted by C. Walton Lillehei and Richard Varco . Four years later it was the surgeon who approached the engineer -- just the opposite of Lindbergh approaching Carrel .  The surgeon of course was Dr. Lillehei and the engineer was Earl Bakken who ran a little repair business called Medtronic.  That was the real beginning of biomedical engineering and the first chapter in the story of one of the world's leading biomedical clusters.

Results reflect the organizational advantage achieved through a cluster-driven Web portal.

Regional clusters of innovation are increasingly viewed as national resources with a global reach. The MBBNet – Zurich MedNet Web Portal Link, joining the heart of North America with the heart of Europe, was dedicated at the University of Minnesota and the Swiss Embassy in Washington, DC in September 2000.

Zurich MedNet is a medical/biotech cluster of the Winterthur Consortium and the Zurich Network. The Zurich region is “economic Switzerland,” strong in precision machining and medical devices, especially orthopedic devices.  Switzerland is one of the countries studied by Michael Porter in The Competitive Advantage of Nations (1990).  It has a solid innovation infrastructure, a strong system of public education and significant capital resources, but it lacks a tradition of entrepreneurship. Zurich MedNet has engaged in its activities the Universities of Applied Science in Winterthur and Wadenswil and the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, which is spinning off biotech start-ups. The pioneering New Product Design and Business Development (NPDBD) program has been supported by Swiss companies and has graduated Swiss students.  The NPDBD program is a collaborative venture between the Carlson School of Management, the Departments of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering, and sponsoring companies.  Teams of graduate engineering and business students and faculty along with company employees work to develop a working prototype of a new product and a business plan. Genesis Business Centers, under Harlan Jacobs, is the on-the-ground liaison for building the MBBNet – Zurich MedNet Link in Minnesota.

Factor Conditions are inputs in Porter’s “Diamond of Advantage” for how the public and private sectors can work together.  In a regional cluster system, they are the investments. Stem cell technology being developed through the Stem Cell Institute in the University’s Academic Health Center is a broadly enabling technology with important implications for regenerative medicine.  Biomaterials and biosensors:  Initiative lead by the University’s College of Biological Sciences and Institute of Technology through the interdisciplinary Biotechnology Institute that looks to use biocatalysis (enzymes and microbes) to make brand new environmentally friendly materials out of plant matter/biomass, with applications in healthcare and industry.  Miniaturization and nanotechnology:  Minnesota has significant engineering research capabilities for miniaturizing medical devices and diagnostic instruments. Technology-enhanced health services may be an emerging cluster in Minnesota.

Owen Wangensteen, chief of surgery during the revolution in surgery in Minnesota during the 1950s, invented a suction device called the “Wangensteen Tube” for treating intestinal blockage.  He was inducted into the Minnesota Inventors Hall of Fame in 1983.