• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

OU's South Campus Develops into Area of Research, Business

Posted on: Tuesday, 18 October 2005, 18:00 CDT

By Jim Stafford, The Daily Oklahoman

Oct. 18--When Ken Parker decided the 4,000-square-foot log cabin he built in Noble no longer met the growth needs of RiskMetrics Group's Oklahoma office, he looked to the nearby University of Oklahoma for space.

The university's South Research Campus on the far south side of the OU campus offered a 50,000-square-foot One Partners Place building that features a mix of private companies, such as RiskMetrics, and university offices.

However, the "no vacancy" sign was posted on One Partners Place. Although the university is developing a second building available to private companies, it won't be finished until late 2006.

Parker was forced to look elsewhere to house his 53 employees. He already had added a temporary building near the original structure in Noble.

"We were disappointed that the timing didn't work out," Parker said. "OU was our first choice. That's a growing, thriving place where space was already committed."

Through the Norman Economic Development Coalition, he was able to find up to 14,000 square feet available at the former Saxon Publishing Headquarters just down the road on State Highway 9. The building is the same in which San Jose, Calif.-based Software Development Technologies is bringing up to 200 jobs to an Oklahoma development office it has opened.

For OU, the full house at One Partners Place and the development of a second building are evidence of the success of its plan to develop a 271-acre patch of prairie into a high-tech research community.

The university also built the 90,000 square-foot Stephenson Research and Technology Center on the south campus, which is just north of the 244,000-square-foot National Weather Center. The first phase of the OU South Research Campus represents an investment of $100 million and 400,000 square feet of space, according to OU's Web site.

"We started out with this idea of developing the research campus as a place where we can commingle the university and private sector because they can each bring value to each other," said Lee Williams, OU's vice president for research.

The idea of bringing together under one roof folks from different disciplines, backgrounds and nationalities is seen all over the South Research Campus.

For instance, the Stephenson Center is designed with open architecture that features lots of common areas for networking.

"We have all these people from all these different research groups who have their own space, but they also hang out a lot with each other, and that's where you get some of your best ideas," Williams said. "The Stephenson building is really designed to be a living community, an intellectual community where ideas can flow."

The same theory holds in the National Weather Center, which brings university and government weather researchers into the same building.

The concept is carried over into the Partners Place concept, too.

"What you find is when you have the space and the capacity, that in itself stimulates some conversations and opportunities that you wouldn't have otherwise," Williams said. "We realized we were going to be very quickly needing a second (building). We started on the process of planning for what is going to become Two Partner's Place."

A third Partners Place building to house both university, public and private entities already is being discussed, Williams said.

"We are seeing this thing kind of rolling," he said.

-----

To see more of The Daily Oklahoman, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.newsok.com.

Copyright (c) 2005, The Daily Oklahoman

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

Source: The Daily Oklahoman

More News in this Category