Click here for Part I

Leveraging public economic development experience to build a university community

Ken Ulman is the CEO of Margrave Strategies, a full service consulting strategic advisory firm. With over a dozen clients in Maryland and the Mid-Atlantic region, Margrave Strategies provides planning and economic development services to businesses and institutions alike. The firm’s initial anchor client is the University of Maryland College Park, where Ken serves as Chief Strategy Officer for Economic Development. Margrave has since expanded its reach to other Maryland universities, including Towson University, where Ulman and his team will develop a comprehensive placemaking strategy to support a number of the President’s priorities, including BTU: Partnerships at Work for Greater Baltimore, the institution’s effort to give greater presence and purpose to the existing partnerships underway between TU and dozens of businesses and non-profit organizations within Greater Baltimore.

Prior to starting Margrave Strategies, Ken served as County Executive of Howard County, Maryland, from 2006–2014. His public service career spans nearly two decades with experience as a County Councilman and Secretary of the Cabinet, as well as Director of the Board of Public Works in Maryland Governor Parris Glendening’s administration.

Ken Ulman spoke with citybizlist publisher Edwin Warfield for this interview.

EDWIN WARFIELD: What led you down this path after so many years in politics?

KEN ULMAN: I was incredibly honored to serve as county executive in Howard County for eight years and county counsel for four, chair of the zoning board, and I really love place-making. I focused on place-making in the intersection between real estate and economic development in Howard County, and I was looking for an opportunity that would also combine those aspects. Wallace Loh, the president of the University of Maryland, called and said, “Listen, we have truly one of the great research universities in the country—here is our flagship in Maryland at the College Park. Our academics are on the rise, our athletics are on the rise; our culture of innovation entrepreneurship, led by and inspired by people like Kevin Plank and others, is on the rise; but we are not going to reach our potential unless we are also a great university community: a place where faculty and staff want to live, a place with lots of private sector job opportunities, with retail, with hotels, with the kind of recreation amenities.” When you think of an ideal university community, whatever jumps into your mind, a lot of people think about driving down Route 1 and they think great university but it could be a better place. So, I have the opportunity and honor to serve as chief strategy officer here at the University of Maryland focused on economic development, but it’s also really place-making.

You can’t do economic development in a vacuum or you cannot help commercialize technology without the kind of office places and spaces, whether it be R&D facilities or co-working or class A office or incubators, accelerators. You need to have the real estate in play tied together and that’s what we are now doing here at College Park.

We have a number of venues on campus whether through MTech ventures, with our engineering and computer science programs, Startup Shell. We have the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship, which is based in our Smith School of Business. We have Hinman CEOs, where 90 juniors and seniors live together, and live, learn, and launch new companies. Over the last decade plus we are leading the country when it comes to this culture of innovation on campus. What we are now executing is the vision that says: We want you to stay here. We want you to stay and grow and thrive here. And, if you then move on to another place in Maryland, if you then move to Baltimore and build Under Armour? Well that’s wonderful, because we’re a state institution—we’re the flagship—but we need to have enough of an ecosystem that gets those folks growing and thriving here.

There are a number of alumni who have graduated from this university and gone on to start some of the great companies in the world. When you think about Google, you think about Sergey Brin who grew up here in Prince George's County, went to Prince George's County Public School; his father was a math professor here for a number of decades. But where was Google launched? It was launched on the West Coast. You think about Brendan Iribe—Brendan is the CEO of Oculus, which sold to Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg for $2 billion. Brendan’s on the West Coast as well, although he still comes back; his family still lives here in Maryland. And of course you think about Kevin Plank. What Brendan and Kevin have in common is they both come back and make major gifts and contributions to the university. Kevin made a $25 million gift to remake Cole Field House into the center of human performance and sports science, so that is now under construction, where it will be not just the home of the football program but also the headquarters of our innovation and entrepreneurship academy. It will also be a place for University of Maryland Baltimore, our partners of medical school to come in and take about 50,000 square feet for orthopedic and neuroscience research, et cetera. That has been enabled because of Kevin’s gift.

Brendan made a $31 million contribution. We are now under construction with the Iribe Center for Computer Science with a focus on virtual and augmented reality. Those are amazing contributions and incredibly important on the academic side. What we are now doing is engaging our alums like Kevin, like Brendan, and so many others, to also help us create this ecosystem of innovation where companies that are started here actually can grow and thrive in College Park. I think about what would have happened had they created their companies in an environment where we had executed this ecosystem of innovation. We have a number of examples where we’re helping those companies find the right office spaces—in some cases building out those spaces—enabling them to grow here, and that’s not just to create the jobs, but it’s also for our students experience. So, now students get an opportunity to be hired to stay here and intern. And so we have an economic development focus, but again it’s tied to that real estate play.

ABOUT OFFIT KURMAN

Offit Kurman is one of the fastest-growing, full-service law firms in the Mid-Atlantic region. With over 120 attorneys offering a comprehensive range of services in virtually every legal category, the firm is well positioned to meet the needs of dynamic businesses and the people who own and operate them. Our eight offices serve individual and corporate clients in the Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and Northern Virginia markets, as well as the Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City metropolitan areas. At Offit Kurman, we are our clients’ most trusted legal advisors, professionals who help maximize and protect business value and personal wealth. In every interaction, we consistently maintain our clients’ confidence by remaining focused on furthering their objectives and achieving their goals in an efficient manner. Trust, knowledge, confidence—in a partner, that’s perfect.

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

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