Arrowhead Center is an interesting entity for a number of reasons beyond being located at NMSU and focused on regional innovation and the home of the Early College HS, a new school of medicine and some actual businesses, and some odds and ends.

For one, it’s that odd public/private/non profit entity which tries to straddle the silos of government, education, and private enterprise. For another, it has seemingly the potential to support development of the online public services that PSA works to support.

Here’s an article from the LCSN talking about Arrowhead’s plans, and planning machinations, upcoming.

[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Arrowhead-Park-looking-to-fill-growing-needs-Las-Cruces-Sun-News.pdf”]

 

Perhaps such undertakings are inescapably vague and confusing,  and trying to “plan the future” is going to involve some wandering around in the dark. Is there another example of this sort of “incubator at a university”…. that we might compare and contrast Arrowhead with to get a sense of how well they are doing with their opportunities?

Quite possibly an incubator that’s working well could appear from the outside to be unstructured, and doing a lot of improvisation. Something that we don’t expect from established institutions necessarily, especially universities. I would not necessarily want the job of explaining that improvisation to the powers that be. OTOH, accountability has to exist somehow for programs receiving public funding.

How did DARPA do it all those years? They were quite successful in supporting innovation. Perhaps it was just assumed whatever DARPA was doing was by definition innovative, and expectations were of the “if we get one really terrific invention out of 50 attempts, we’re happy”? There’s probably some histories and articles on how DARPA did it, that could be informative for today’s innovation incubators.

One particular item of note: the present ED of Arrowhead, Wayne Savage, mentions that entities should locate themselves at Arrowhead because Arrowhead can offer advanced broadband service through the NMSU infrastructure and pipes.

PSA, and other groups, have long wondered how to leverage NMSU’s access to fiber backbones in and out of the state. Is there something new being discussed by Wayne Savage? (note earlier post here from Jan. 21 on “dark fiber” use in LA and other parts of the country.)