Click here for Part I & Part II

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: In order for the University of Maryland to take its rightful place among the great university innovation ecosystems in this country—whether that be Austin, Texas with UT; whether it be in Silicon Valley through Stanford and Berkeley and Caltech; whether it be in Boston with Harvard and MIT; whether it be the Research Triangle with what they have done there, what we have to do and are now doing is combining the innovation entrepreneurship spirit, which also includes tech commercialization from our faculty—not just students, but faculty-created companies—you have to marry that with a real estate strategy. I have a long wait list of the venture community and the community of folks who provide access to capital and resources. They want to be here. We have not had office spaces that were worthy, if you will. We are going to announce a dynamic co-working space very soon, where folks will be able to rent desks. We have Corporate Office Properties Trust about to break ground—just announced a new 75,000-square-foot Class-A building on spec: the first speculative Class-A building in Prince George’s County over a decade, and it happens to be right on the Purple Line stop. So, now that we have that product coming out of the ground, we’re talking to folks about come and taking spaces, and they’re incredibly excited about it.

We are first and foremost a flagship university for the State of Maryland, but we’re also the largest most significant, most important public research university serving our nation’s capital, inside the beltline. Our location: You can jump on MARC train and be at Camden Yards; you can jump on the Green Line or the MARC and be at Union Station; and to access the most powerful city in the world—here in Washington, DC—but yet we also have the ability, in College Park, to deliver that classic university experience, that university environment. But so many great university towns are in the middle of nowhere. We have the university place—now with what we are doing on Baltimore Avenue and our research park and our venture district, the Purple Line connecting in the mass transit on the doorstep of our nation’s capital, right down the road from Baltimore—our location if we maximize, as we’re now maximizing our opportunities, we have an opportunity unlike any.

Q. Why do you think this region has suffered as a “place,” and what advantages do you see in making it what it should be?

A. People often ask me: “Why did it take so long?” You know, if you’ve been driving up and down Route 1—I call it Route 1 when I think of it in the past tense—so people have been coming to basketball and football games, or visiting their students, their children, et cetera, and they’ve been driving down Route 1 for years, saying, “Why can’t it look better? Why can’t it be more inviting?” And frankly it took Wallace Loh to become president of the University of Maryland. The stars were aligned, you had a president who said, “You know what? Academics, athletics, the culture of innovation, the research enterprise—it’s all doing very well, but we have to reinvest in this place. We have to create this dynamic ecosystem, this dynamic innovation community.” So it is his vision: it’s why I am here, it’s why a number of folks are here executing on this vision.

The other thing that I would say is Prince George's County has become a very good place to do business. County Executive has done a nice job of being a good place to be a part of.

The third thing that we have working to our advantage is DC real estate. There are neighborhoods that were really suffering and struggling 10–20 years ago that are now thriving. So, the development community in the DC area is really now taking a look at this College Park, Hyattsville, Greenbelt corridor in a way that perhaps they hadn’t in the past.

Q. What’s up next?

A. This is a really exciting time, here in College Park. We’re finally living up to sort of the flagship status and the land grant concept. We were created by the federal government to be a place of innovation at the time around agriculture innovation, but the University of Maryland is now living up to its role as being at the heart of innovation place-making, and that provides a much more enriched experience for our students first and foremost, but also for our faculty and staff. If folks have not been down recently, please drive down. You can see about eight tower cranes dotting the landscape, and with the Purple Line coming in right through campus, with the Whole Foods opening, with our hotel opening in the fall, co-working space, a new food and arts and innovation hall—we’ll start construction on the new non-student housing development and double the amount of retail in town in one project—it’s a really, really exciting time.

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.

You can connect with Offit Kurman via our Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn pages. You can also sign up to receive Law Matters, Offit Kurman’s monthly newsletter covering a diverse selection of legal and corporate thought leadership content.

MARYLAND | PENNSYLVANIA | VIRGINIA | NEW JERSEY | NEW YORK | DELAWARE | WASHINGTON, DC

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

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

Connect on LinkedIn