UW president likes 'innovation' zone for U District

Nineteen days on the job, the new president of the University of Washington is talking up the idea of an "innovation district" within Seattle's U District that would nurture new businesses and provide "dramatically mixed-use" areas for living and working.

Michael Young, the new UW president and former president of the University of Utah, sat down with the Seattle City Council Tuesday afternoon to discuss a wide range of ideas. But it was the innovation district that stood out.

It is not Young's idea; both the city and the UW have had "very casual conversations" about how the University District will be redeveloped after light-rail stations open near Husky Stadium and on Brooklyn Avenue Northeast, said Paul Jenny, vice provost of the UW's planning and budgeting department. The first station, near the stadium, is expected to open in 2016.

Young described such a district as filled with "practical spaces," where innovative businesses can find incubator space next door to the university, close enough to easily use UW laboratories and equipment, but not located on campus itself. An innovation district would "provide a place where we can nurture and grow these businesses," Young said.

The district would have living and retail space, "a place that will be walkable and aesthetically pleasant and add to the vibrancy" of the city, he said. "This is something we have in a very serious way on the drawing board."

Such a district could be modeled after Kendall Square, a neighborhood in Cambridge, Mass., adjacent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jenny said. MIT owns some of the land in that neighborhood, and has recently redeveloped it for high-tech tenants.

Young said that when new businesses are allowed to forge a strong connection to the university, those businesses often remain in the city and hire the university's graduates.

At Utah, Young gained a national reputation as a leader in helping to turn university inventions into new businesses. The UW, too, has moved aggressively in recent years to commercialize its discoveries.

Young said it's important for universities to commercialize so inventions can make it out of the research lab and into the marketplace. "If we cure cancer, but it stays in the test tube, nobody gets better," he said.

Katherine Long: 206-464-2219 or klong@seattletimes.com