The St. Louisans who journeyed to Minneapolis-St. Paul with the RCGA this week found many things to be jealous of. For the technology-industry folks among the 87 delegates, the biggest outbreak of jealousy was inspired by Dick Sommerstad, director of academic and corporate relations at the University of Minnesota.

Sommerstad participated in a panel discussion on Minnesota’s innovation economy, and clearly the university plays a huge part in spurring innovation. With 65,000 students and half a billion dollars in research grants, it’s a giant generator of both human and intellectual capital.

Sommerstad doesn’t describe himself as a technology-transfer czar or a development officer, although those are among his duties. He simply describes himself as “the front door for business at the university.” That means he tries to help companies find out what the U of M has to offer them, and tries to make the university responsive to business’ needs. He commented:

Data mining the university, ours or Missouri or Washington University or anyplace else, is very difficult. My job is to make it less difficult.

In one initiative,  his office  surveyed every business in Minnesota with $2 million or more in revenue — from farms to giant Target Corp. — to find out what they wanted from the university. In another the university’s Venture Center can actually launch, and own 100 percent of, companies based on U of M research.

Among the jealous responders were Frank Stokes, chief executive of Innovate St. Louis:

We have great universities in St. Louis. We might want to work a little harder on how we get innovation out of them and into the economy.

And Donn Rubin, executive director of the Coalition for Plant and Life Sciences:

St. Louis is as well positioned as you are in terms of having the intellectual capacity. … There are a few Stanfords and MITs in this country that have this entrepreneurial culture, but in most universities we have this culture where business is a dirty word. You are overcoming that here in Minnesota, and we are starting to overcome that in St. Louis.