By Staff Writer – Boonsri Dickinson (@boonspoon)

Today was absolutely beautiful. I was excited to visit the Wired Store for the first time, but it was closed. Instead, my editor Kris Smith and I drank coffee at the local Starbucks.

Then I took the subway to Wall Street, had a short brisk walk past Ground Zero, before I entering the 40^th floor of the New York Academy of Sciences. Experts from SUNY, IBM, Cornell, and Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D were in the house.

I was in for two hours of discussions about how industry and academia work together. The world is changing. The days of the crazy Einstein scientist image is over — some scientists work with corporations on more applied research. When the technology is commercialized, the economic impact is huge.

BP gave Energy Biosciences Institute $500 million over 10 years to conduct research on biofuels.  As part of the agreement, BP scientists would work directly with Berkeley and Illinois scientists. “We have corporate and academic partners sitting in the same space,” says James Weyhenmeyer, a senior vice provost for research at SUNY. The “cross pollination” has really made a difference.

Creating relationships is one thing, but finding good people to work for the corporations is another. Stevel LaFleche, the managing director for New York State at IBM, says “we need to create smarter people and a talent pool. It’s critical for our future.” IBM is growing smart “ecosystem” by funding educational programs at some universities. A perfect partnership that has gone right is the one IBM set up with Albany in 1996. They created the Albany NanoTech Complex, which has been a huge hit. By 2013, IBM would have put in $1 billion there.

Universities can participate in the economy and can help create jobs, says Rene Baston, the chief business officer at NYAS. But collaboration takes work — NYAS has found a sweet spot as a middleman. The academy develops R&D relationships with companies and universities and also has a network of 25,000 scientists. “We can put together a team of scientists to spend a day helping companies,” says Baston. That way, the companies don’t have to have in-house researchers. NYAS wants to turn Mexico City, Delhi, Sao Paulo, and Buenos Aires into high tech hot spots. If those serendipitous interactions that happen in the Bay area. Then they can happen just about anywhere, as long as the culture is there.

It’s already happening right here, in New York City.