University Research Corridor

The three institutions of the URC together draw $1.878 billion in federal academic research dollars to Michigan, 94 percent of the total coming into the state.

[1] Over the past five years, URC universities have announced an average of one new invention every day, and collectively these discoveries have led to more than 500 license agreements for new technologies and systems.

Detroit News columnist Dan Howes once wrote that the three universities together offer “the closest thing Michigan has to Silicon Valley—an intellectual powerhouse.”[2] The URC had 137,583 students enrolled in the fall of 2010.

However, when traveling to East Lansing, the Capital Region International Airport is the most convenient—just a 20-minute commute to the MSU campus.

A 2014 Economic Impact Report by Anderson Economic Group ranked the URC second in the Innovation Power Ranking when compared to seven other major university research clusters in six states, including well-known hubs such as North Carolina's Research Triangle Park, California's Innovation Hubs and Massachusetts’ Route 128 Corridor.