In the heart of Hampton Roads, Old Dominion University just launched a National Security Institute, consolidating its autonomous systems, maritime, and cyber research under one roof and creating a new competitive weapon for a region known as America's military metro.
As regions compete to anchor the new defense industrial base, the research university is becoming a core piece of winning ecosystems – not just as a talent pipeline, but as an organizing layer between industry, capital, and innovation.
Economic development luminary Bruce Katz, who has spent the past two years mapping over 70,000 defense industrial assets across the country, told Standard & Works the research university is now the defining advantage for any region trying to hold or build its position.
"For the hubs – those ten or fifteen or twenty places that already are the platform – what is happening today is a signal you need to move up the value chain," Katz said. "You need to think much more clearly about the role of your universities."
Katz cites Vanderbilt, which in December established a quantum institute in Chattanooga – over 100 miles from its home base in Nashville – to capitalize on quantum computing investment already clustering there, as the model.
"We could see an unanchoring of mature anchor institutions, universities in particular, so you can more closely align production, innovation, and technology," he said. "That gives you the ability to produce today, but it also gives you a platform for dual use growth over time."
Hampton Roads is already seeing this with the Secure Energy Future Center, a hub affiliated with Virginia Tech's Corporate Research Center, which recently opened in Newport News next to Jefferson Lab, a national laboratory.
The Center infuses energy innovation into the heart of a region renowned for maritime, defense, aerospace, and logistics capabilities, 250 miles from Virginia Tech's Blacksburg campus.
That proximity is what ODU's National Security Institute is positioning to capitalize on.
"Researchers are working in close proximity to systems that are deployed in operational environments, from ports and shipyards to coastal infrastructure and complex supply chains," ODU said. "That proximity shapes ODU-NSI's research."
For a region like Hampton Roads that is already indispensable to the defense industrial base, the university layer compounds its advantage.
300 miles away the University of North Carolina at Charlotte is using the same strategy to stake its region’s claim to the emerging map.
The university launched its National Defense and Intelligence Innovation Institute, NDI3, earlier this year, making defense a strategic priority less than a year after attaining R1 designation.
UNC Charlotte’s Vice Chancellor for Research John Daniels spoke with Standard & Works last week about the vision.
"Instead of having silos of professors and research centers and expertise, let's bring them together," he said. "Have them talking to each other, invest in them, and position ourselves with our ears to the ground as to what our industry is saying they need, and what the Department of War and other agencies need."
He expects the institute to yield more graduates with defense and intelligence expertise, new R&D outcomes, increased patent commercialization, startups, and deeper connectivity with local industry.
NDI3 is also part of a statewide push to catalyze North Carolina's defense ecosystem that also includes a new Defense and Security Institute at NC State.
Last month, UNC Charlotte announced it was teaming with RTI International – the anchor tenant of Research Triangle Park – ahead of an anticipated Defense Innovation Unit OnRamp Hub in the state, which will accelerate connectivity between corporate partners and the Department of War.
Daniels frames the partnership as a continuation of the ecosystem-building model North Carolina pioneered in life sciences.
"As I think about the prowess in life sciences in Research Triangle Park, and how that has been a product of universities, the government, and industry working together – look at what that's done there," he said. "We're doing the exact same thing in defense and manufacturing."
This kind of connectivity is what Katz calls "radical collaboration."
"That only exists in a few places," Katz said, "not just because of institutions, but because of people who are able to move seamlessly across these different elements of the economic ecosystem."
Katz points to Pittsburgh, where the AI Strike Team has leveraged Carnegie Mellon and Pitt alongside NVIDIA, Gecko Robotics, and the Army's AI Integration Center, to build an AI Avenue corridor and nationally-leading ecosystem.
But the case for universities as defense infrastructure rests on one assumption: that they can move at defense speed.
"Academia writ large is not known for the speed of its processes or its activities,” Daniels said, but he pointed to UNC Charlotte's leadership, growing region, and commercialization track record – top five nationally for patents and startups created per research dollar – as evidence of what's possible when an institution is determined to move with urgency.
"Those institutions that are able to meet this moment by having a robust portfolio of programs that are responsive to needs are the ones that are going to do well."
