Bob Linscheid

Bob Linscheid wears a lot of hats, but the biggest one by far—his 10-gallon Stetson, you might say—is the one he donned this week: the chairmanship of the California State University Board of Trustees.

These are tough times on the state’s higher-education front, and Linscheid—the longtime head of the Chico Economic Planning Corp. (CEPCO) and owner of the public-relations and business-consultancy firm The Linscheid Co., as well as a CSU trustee since 2005—is now at the epicenter of the effort to sustain the CSU as one of the world’s great university systems.

Bob Linscheid PHOTO BY ROBERT SPEER

In addition to having to accommodate tremendous funding reductions—$750 million last year alone, 27 percent of its total budget—the 23-campus system also has six empty presidencies. Linscheid is on two of the presidential search committees, including as chairman of the one looking for a president for CSU, Northridge.

He’s also a member of the trustees’ Compensation and Selection Committee, tasked with revamping the presidential-selection process. Its final report is due in late January.

Heretofore the trustees have offset the budget cutbacks by hiking student tuition, and they may have to do so again. “I’m hoping the slide [in funding] has stopped,” Linscheid said during a recent interview. “But my thinking is we might have to put a cap on enrollment.”

There’s more to being a trustee than money matters, of course. Linscheid also wants to advance the system to become a national leader in applied research with a focus on innovation. He also intends to drive the connectivity among academia, venture capital, private equity, entrepreneurship, public policy and federal labs.

For example, Chico has about five start-up companies built around laser technology. Linscheid would like to bring a laser expert from, say, Lawrence Livermore National Lab to town to teach at the university and work with these companies.

In this respect he’s doing what he’s long done in his business career: fostering innovation and economic development by bringing people together and providing advice. He’ll continue that this year with CEPCO and also with a new venture, Grow California, a spin-off of Jon Gregory’s Golden Capital Network.

Gregory and Linscheid are partnered in Grow California with Dr. Rick Hubbard, who teaches at Chico State after a three-decade career with software companies in Silicon Valley. Each year the group hosts four business-development conferences that showcase an industry that’s vertically important to the state. It also brings two new products to the innovation marketplace: the Innovation Scorecard and its subsequent service offering for communities, called Momentum Builder.

So that’s one more hat to wear. Fortunately, Linscheid has left one hat he wore for years—being president of the Chico Outlaws—hanging on the rack. That job was just too much work, he said.

—Robert Speer