One waggish definition of an "expert" is someone who comes from out of town to tell us what we already know. And in that regard, William Fruth more than fits the bill.

Fruth is president of POLICOM Corp., a South Florida-based firm that specializes in analyzing local economies. He has evaluated economic data for more than 600 communities, and he appeared at an economic development summit at the Hilton on Wednesday to talk about "Where the money is in the Gainesville/Alachua County Economy."

Fruth told us that the money in Gainesville and Alachua County comes mainly from state government, through the University of Florida. Which we know.

And that this community's economic well-being is way too dependent on UF's rising and falling fortunes. Which we know.

And that Gainesville and Alachua County desperately need to diversify their economic base in order to lessen their dangerous dependence on UF. Which we know.

We've known all of that for years. We've talked about it endlessly in the course of local political campaigns. It comes up regularly at Chamber of Commerce roundtables and in letters to the editor and in discussions between city and county commissioners and UF officials and business leaders.

But having told us what we already know, Fruth proceeded to stump us with a question that escapes easy answer.

To wit: If we know all of that, why haven't we acted on that information?

"Communities would die to have your university as an economic asset," Fruth said. "As long as it has been here, it's embarrassing that there's been so little manufacturing brought here. After adjusting for inflation, the (local) economy is about where it was 30 years ago."

Furth contrasted Gainesville's unhealthy dependence on UF with what's been going on in Madison, Wis.

Since 1990, thousands of high-tech manufacturing jobs have been created in that university city, mostly by "growing" spinoff companies taking advantage of research being done at the University of Wisconsin. Today, nearly 10 percent of the jobs in Madison-Dane are manufacturing, as opposed to just 4 percent in Alachua County.

"That didn't happen by accident but through an aggressive economic development program," he said.

Fruth also has done work in Orlando and Tampa, where, he said, the University of Central Florida and the University of South Florida are aggressively working with their host communities to grow new companies and create new jobs.

"Those areas have more representatives in the Legislature than you do," he said. "The state has invested billions of dollars in UF, and those urban universities are becoming very aggressive and very hungry. The state wants to direct resources to areas that will take advantage of it. If you do not, then other universities will take advantage of it."

We know that, too, that UF lacks the political clout to protect its state revenue stream against the ambitions of younger, more urban institutions.

That knowledge alone should lend some sense of urgency to the task of capitalizing on the intellectual capital being produced at UF in order to diversify Gainesville's economy and create more, better paying jobs.

Because right now prospects for doing so have never been better. UF is one of the largest public graduate-research universities in the South, along with the likes of the University of North Carolina, Duke and Texas.

But Gainesville certainly has not prospered like Austin or some of the communities located in North Carolina's famed Research Triangle.

And that's not UF's fault. The university has a growing and aggressive program aimed at getting research out of the lab and into the marketplace. Researchers at UF are credited with making 275 inventions last year. The university ranks 10th in the nation in patents and 8th in royalties. Last year, UF collected more in royalties from licensed inventions - $34 million - than MIT.

But as David Day, director of UF's Office of Technology and Licensing, said at the summit of that royalty money, "UF gets two or three cents off the dollar, the rest goes to New Jersey, New York, Connecticut. ..."

Keeping more of that money at home by figuring out how to tap into UF's intellectual productivity in order to grow jobs and diversify the local economy needs to become a top priority for local government and business leaders. It's long past time to act on the knowledge we've had for years about our dangerously vulnerable local economy.

"We're sitting on a gold mine here," Dan Rua, Gainesville's only venture capitalist, said at Wednesday's economic development summit. "What worries me is that we've been sitting on a gold mine for a long time, for years and years and years."

See June 4, 2004, issue of Gainesville Sun for original article.