hen Gerhard Casper first approached me with the idea of the Stanford Graduate Fellowships program in 1996, I was immediately taken by its simplicity and ingenuity. As one who has lived and worked in Silicon Valley for 20 years, I fully appreciate the role Stanford graduates and faculty have played in the region’s emergence as the high-tech leader of the world.

The Stanford Graduate Fellowships program was designed to support 300 graduate students in science and engineering, each for a period of three years. To free these students and Stanford University from the vagaries of federal funding, President Casper announced a plan to raise $200 million in endowment to support the program. To date, $140 million has been raised, of which $100 million provides seed money that is matched on a 1:1 basis with gifts of $300,000 or more to create individually endowed, named fellowships.

One of the most surprising and pleasing trends that emerges from reviewing the donor honor roll is the popularity the program enjoys among corporate leaders. To date, 10 companies have supported this program for a total of $8.5 million. A decade ago, this probably would not have surprised anyone familiar with the relationship between the corporate world and academia. In the past, while many corporations supported basic research through in-house labs, where researchers were given almost unlimited freedom in choosing their projects, most major corporations also funded university-based research. This was especially true in the fields of high-tech and bio-technology, where there was a track record of excellent investments.

In recent years, however, there has been a shift in the way corporations view their role in developing basic research. Many corporations have closed their own research labs, and where such labs still exist (and to be sure, there aren’t many), the research has become increasingly focused on narrow fields that directly benefit the company’s overall mission and contribute to its bottom line.

Indeed, corporate giving trends have changed dramatically over the course of the past decade. Corporate philanthropy in the 1990s tends to focus on the short-term and comprises mostly expendable gifts and capital equipment. While such support is invaluable to educational institutions faced with shrinking budgets, it does not promote the university’s mission of developing broad-based long-term research. Large, endowed gifts are now the exception among corporate donors, as they reevaluate their philanthropic spending.

Given these circumstances, corporate support for the Stanford Graduate Fellowships is extremely encouraging. I believe this reflects a high level of confidence in the research conducted at Stanford and a belief that such an investment will bear excellent fruit.

Of course, it goes without saying that Stanford is a rich breeding ground for cutting-edge research and that many successful Silicon Valley companies germinated from and are closely tied to Stanford’s faculty, students, and research laboratories. My own company, Cisco Systems, is but one example. The Stanford Graduate Fellowships program, however, is a novel idea. Undoubtedly, the best ideas come from unfettered research, which is free from the constraints and uncertainties that surround federal funding. With a large endowment, created by the support of individual and corporate donors, Stanford is able to support long-term projects and is in a better position than its peers to cultivate ground-breaking innovative research.

The Stanford Graduate Fellowships program can be viewed as a partnership. Through their involvement in the program, corporations can develop relationships with some of the most promising scholars in the nation and, indeed, in the world. They can interact with these scholars, keep abreast of scientific developments, and perhaps recruit these top-flight students upon graduation. This is an opportunity every company should seriously consider.

As individuals, we often lack the time and resources to sort through the myriad requests we receive for our philanthropic dollars. With an honor roll boasting such names as Chevron, Rambus, PACCAR, Hewlett-Packard, and ARCO, to name a few, it is clear that the SGF program has passed the due diligence of a number of prudent corporate investors. This is a strong sign that these corporations, in addition to a respectable group of individual donors, view their support as an important investment in the future of Stanford University and in the future of scientific discovery.