Duane Roth: The Connector Who Wired Up an Innovation Economy

Duane Roth Memorial at Church of Immaculata

The seating capacity of the University of San Diego’s Church of the Immaculata is approximately 900, and it is telling that the memorial service held late Friday morning for Connect CEO Duane Roth was standing room only.

The Spanish style church on the USD campus is one of the biggest in San Diego. Somber guests stood in small groups within the 20 side chapels along the central nave. People also spilled out of the doorways. They lined the walls of the cross-shaped church, which is 200 feet long and 148 feet wide across the transcept. Former U.S. Senator Pete Wilson was there. So was Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs, Gateway founder Ted Waitt, UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla, former San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, and hundreds of other CEOs, scientists, entrepreneurs, and business leaders who came to pay their respects.

Roth’s untimely death on Aug. 3 was the result of a head injury he incurred in a July 21 bicycling accident. He was 63. San Diego’s business and political leaders turned out in droves because Roth touched so many people here.

“He showed the way, but he also cleared the space beneath the boards,” basketball legend Bill Walton said in a moving tribute after the memorial, at a reception held by the Roth family at the exclusive Valencia Resort in Rancho Santa Fe. “When things got tough, Duane was always the one who stepped to the fore and said, ‘I’ll take care of this.’”

Duane Roth
Duane Roth

Roth served the regional innovation community in many capacities—as a biotech CEO and as a member of many nonprofit boards overseeing San Diego’s biotech industry, economic development and policy, healthcare policy, stem cell development, university research, and technology innovation. His varied interests seemed to come together, though, in his role as the CEO of Connect, the San Diego nonprofit group established to promote technology innovation and entrepreneurship. His innate sense of purpose flourished at Connect, which became his bully pulpit, and the eight and a half years he spent there could serve as a case study in how to go about developing a regional innovation economy.

Roth came to San Diego with the 1989 merger of Otisville Biopharm of Otisville, NY, and Fluoromed Pharmaceutical of San Diego. The combined company, renamed Alliance Pharmaceutical, set out to

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.