RESEARCH

Creating an environment that celebrates and encourages entrepreneurism will result in new innovative businesses and processes. As such, BRAC has worked to push the Capital Region and state's innovation efforts forward with research that analyzes historically successful programs and strategies from around the world and provides paths toward favorable implementation.

2010 Regional Innovation Strategy
Properly fostering the Capital Region’s economic assets is a top priority for BRAC and its allies.  With the creation of the Regional Innovation Strategy, BRAC has developed a game plan for nurturing these assets and the high-growth entrepreneurial companies that come with them.  The strategy recommends two key points that BRAC, and other regional stakeholders, must carry-out over the next few years.  The first is the creation of a regional innovation organization that will align the area’s three incubators and be a “one-stop-shop” for the area’s entrepreneurs.  The second is the development of a true university research park modeled after the premier research parks across the country.

The Innovation Economy in Louisiana
Louisiana leaders are increasingly embracing innovation-based economic development goals as high social and political priorities.  The Innovation Economy in Louisiana analyzes how Louisiana’s strategic focus on innovation as a basis for economic development can ensure that the state is prepared to compete in a 21st century environment.  The paper describes four components necessary for a comprehensive strategy for a statewide innovation ecosystem: research and commercialization, entrepreneurship and workforce development, risk capital, and coordinating authority at the state level. 

Advancing PBRC to Preeminence: Securing Louisiana’s Knowledge-based Economic Foundation
This white paper details a strategy for elevating Pennington Biomedical Research Center (PBRC) to a hierarchical position of biomedical research institutes.  It is segmented into four sections.  The first presents a holistic view of PBRC, including its current strategic plan, funding and expenditure status, and commercialization activities.  The second identifies the attributes found in premier biomedical research facilities.  The third describes the present state of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, the largest contributor of extramural research funding.  The final section proposes the list of recommendations aimed at helping the center ascend to the upper-echelon of research institutes nationally by 2017.