Rhode Island doesn’t attract many fresh faces with innovative ideas.

But last week I saw one with potential when I heard Dr. Timothy J. Babineau, the new president and chief executive officer of Rhode Island Hospital, make his first speech to a group of business and community leaders.

After only 45 days on the job, Babineau showed a clear grasp of the role the hospital plays in the quality of life here and how it can help pull Rhode Island out of its economic doldrums by creating new companies and jobs that increase tax revenues.

He understands that a knowledge-based economy focused on the life sciences pivots around a medical center. He said the model can be used to create new companies in areas such as genetic medicine to medical devices, even in the smallest state.

And he told the crowd that the state could increase its leverage to win federal research dollars that turn ideas into commercial enterprises if Lifespan, the network that includes Rhode Island Hospital, is allowed to merge with Care New England. That proposal to put together the state’s two biggest hospital systems is under regulatory review.

Babineau, 48, knows about Rhode Island because he grew up just up the road in Fitchburg, Mass. The son of a physician, he graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester and went to medical school at the University of Massachusetts, where he also earned an MBA.

For 20 years, he worked at Boston Medical Center as a surgeon and a top administrator, before moving on to be senior vice president and chief medical officer at the University of Maryland Medical Center, where he worked for three years.

He told the audience at a Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce breakfast that he had planned to stay in Maryland for 7 to 12 years, but was recruited to come to Rhode Island Hospital.

“It was an opportunity I could not turn down,” he said.

The job he accepted makes him head of the state’s largest private employer, with about 6,500 workers, as well as the area’s biggest trauma center and the state’s largest hospital, an institution that every day touches the lives of many Rhode Islanders.

He understands the importance and clout of a hospital network, based on his experience in Boston and Baltimore.

In those cities, he said, public and private leaders formed partnerships to make a priority the development of the life sciences, with the medical center as a lynchpin. He gave to the example of Baltimore, with The Johns Hopkins University near downtown and the role it played in helping to revitalize the old port city.

Babineau said the research being done in laboratories at Lifespan and Brown University’s medical school is already being spun off into a developing biotechnology community of small enterprises in Providence’s old Jewelry District. But that’s only a start.

The fuel to spark a full-blown knowledge-based economy in the life sciences will flow from federal research dollars that are imported to Rhode Island.

Babineau noted the state has been successful in bringing in those dollars, especially from the National Institutes of Health. He quoted statistics that show an increase from $18 million in 1997 to $45 million last year.

The challenge now is to keep the money rolling in, especially with talk of cutbacks in Washington because of a ballooning federal deficit and competition from other regions also building research communities.

One answer, he said, is to build on the collaborations already under way among city, state and business leaders to contribute resources and influence.

The other is to build clout by merging Lifespan and Care New England.

He said a bigger Lifespan, with Care New England’s hospitals as part of its network, would be a “catalyst for economic expansion…of high skill, high-paying jobs.”

Besides the goal of increasing its influence on the economy, Babineau said the hospital network will make patient care a top priority.

“We have to make our hospitals the safest in the nation,” he said. “We are committed to transparency and public reporting to meet additional standards … patient safety is not negotiable. It will not be compromised.”

He said that if the goals can be achieved, they would raise the national reputation of Lifespan to place the hospital network among the nation’s unique medical centers.

Babineau’s vision is not unlike that once projected by other Rhode Islanders, whether they have occupied a hospital bed and or been entrusted with the responsibility for rebuilding Rhode Island’s economy.

Too many others, however, have given up the vision, either because they have become cynical after past, failed efforts or because they decided to take their slice of what’s available before any consideration of the common good.

Some of those were sitting in the audience and listening to the young surgeon.

Babineau will soon realize that when he digs into Rhode Island’s culture and tries to make improvements.

His strength will come from his experience outside Rhode Island that shows what can be done; and he will also be emboldened by a desire to create a better future here for his two young children, ages 4 and 6.

A few years from now, Babineau will no longer be a fresh face in town. He will have a report card on what he has accomplished and a new understanding of what it means to be a Rhode Islander.

jkostrze@projo.com