The new Trade, Innovation and Productivity Center will conduct research, accumulate data, teach professionals and develop technologies to help Costa Rican companies export more efficiently.

The center is set to become a venue for student and faculty research and exchange, but leaders say its role will go beyond education into a range of factors affecting the small country's quest to transform the way its companies get products to global markets. It also serves as the initial foothold for a planned network of such centers in Latin America, likely starting in Panama and Chile.

Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson helped inaugurate the center at a reception and dinner at the Intercontinental Hotel on the outskirts of San Jose. Costa Rican President Oscar Arias punctuated the event with a glowing speech praising it as an important step in advancing the economy of Costa Rica, a nation of about 4.5 million people.

Mr. Arias had returned to official duties earlier in the week after taking time off to recover from H1N1 swine flu. He showed no visible signs of fatigue or illness when he took the podium after Costa Rica's national anthem played.

In his speech, the president focused on the theme of chains linking world economies. He outlined Costa Rica's relative strength in the economic downturn while stressing its reliance on other countries in sectors like trade and tourism.

“Costa Rica continues to depend on the international recovery to undertake its own domestic recovery,” he said in Spanish remarks translated into English. “We cannot control when the tide will rise again,” but when it does, his country must be ready to “ride the wave” of newfound prosperity.

Integrating innovation, technology and education in logistics – all incumbent in the Tech center's mission – will be essential to this preparation, said Mr. Arias, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 during his first four-year term as president.

“Today, we are forging the first link in a chain that will bring prosperity and knowledge to hundreds and hundreds in our country,” he said.

Sebastian Urbina, a Costa Rica native, Georgia Tech alumnus and managing director of the TIP center, said it will perform the simultaneous functions of educating Tech students and faculty while offering useful services for Costa Rican companies.

It will conduct broad research but will also partner with local companies, building trade databases that will help them crack new export markets.

Mr. Urbina gave the example of a pineapple grower or a small-scale chicken producer using the database to find markets throughout the U.S. where Costa Rican companies already sell these products.

“We're developing these kinds of tools around the data that's already out there, trying to improve productivity to help the whole country become more competitive,” he said. Initially, the center will focus on food products, high-value electronics and digitized business services.

Modular circuits and computer parts accounted for more than a quarter of the country's exports in 2007, according to the latest data available from PROCOMER, Costa Rica's trade promotion agency. Bananas made up 7 percent of exports that year, the third largest single commodity.

Those statistics show how the country, which started with exports of agricultural commodities like coffee, now targets high-tech exports, Marco Ruiz, Costa Rica's trade minister, told GlobalAtlanta in an interview.

While strong human resources have led many technology companies like Intel Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Development Co. L.P. to set up manufacturing operations in Costa Rica, logistics looms as one of the biggest challenges to attracting more investment and building a broader base of companies, Mr. Ruiz said.

“That's why for us, this association with Georgia Tech and this center will be a milestone,” he said. “Our quest is to be able to compete at the world level. We already have good companies but as a country, the small- and medium-sized companies of Costa Rica need to improve.”

Mr. Urbina, the Georgia Tech center's managing director, said it will include an incubator component that will work with international entrepreneurship classes at Georgia Tech to develop new enterprises. At the same time, it will help existing companies to develop methods to improve their operations.

The center currently has three on-site employees, but that number is deceptive because it doesn't include students and faculty members working on project, he said.

“The human capital dedicated to this is much larger than just the team that we have here, and even the team here will grow and shrink as the needs arise,” Mr. Urbina said.

The center is administered by Tech's School of Industrial and Systems Engineering in partnership with the College of Management as well as PROCOMER and the Costa Rican Chamber of Industries.

Collaborative educational models like the center exemplify a gradual paradigm shift in higher education, said Dr. Peterson, Georgia Tech's president since April 1. Institutions have extended their impact beyond their local communities to states, nations and now the world.

They now must not only be interested in educating students, but also in improving the global communities where they work, Dr. Peterson told GlobalAtlanta.

The new program pairs Georgia Tech's logistics expertise with Costa Rica, a nation of winding, unpaved roads in outlying provinces, a limited network of highways, relatively small ports and tough customs restrictions.

“(The center) gives us an opportunity to take some of the things that our faculty are teaching, some of the tools that the researchers are developing, and apply them to an area where there is a very great need,” Dr. Peterson said.

For Georgia Tech, that mandate extends farther than for many universities. In logistics, Tech has campuses in Savannah and Singapore. It also has campuses in Shanghai, China, and Metz, France, as well as a research center in Athlone, Ireland.

“At Georgia Tech, what we look for are types of situations that allow us to do things that we couldn't otherwise do,” Dr. Peterson said of the school's international strategy.

About 40 percent of Tech's undergraduates engage in an international experience, he said.

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