Nearly a year after offering $100 million to both USC and UCLA to establish biomedical research institutes, entrepreneur Alfred E. Mann is discovering the difference in how each school gets things done.

Privately run USC already has set aside temporary space for the Alfred E. Mann Institute of Biomedical Engineering while it prepares to build a new facility and appoint faculty. It also is well along in its search for a director.

But at publicly run UCLA (Mann’s alma mater), negotiations on a final agreement have dragged on for months though Mann said the university appears to be a couple of weeks away from presenting him with its counter offer.

“It just takes them forever to do anything over there (at UCLA),” Mann said. “USC moves much faster than UCLA does. Much faster. They’ve been wonderful.”

Joining Mann in expressing frustration with UCLA last week was L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan.

“They’ve got a problem at UCLA: politics,” Riordan said. “It’s harder to get things done because they have the regents (the university system’s governing board), the governor and the Legislature.”

Riordan added that the entrepreneurial spirit of UCLA does not appear to have improved much from a decade ago when the mayor, a venture capitalist at the time, attempted to forge business partnerships with the presidents of UC campuses.

“We never really were able to make it work,” Riordan said. “Entrepreneurialism is based on one person having that will, that drive to make things happen.”

Mann agreed, adding, “Where entrepreneurs work singly, universities work by committees.”

Mann’s divergent experiences come at a time when business leaders are working with Riordan to put the biomedical industry on the city’s economic radar screen. On Dec. 9, the mayor joined biomedical executives, venture capitalists and other business leaders for a roundtable discussion about ways to nurture the industry in Los Angeles.

While L.A. has some 500 biomedical companies with a combined workforce of 5,000, the industry remains overshadowed by entertainment and new media. And in terms of visibility within the biomed community, Los Angeles ranks a distant fourth behind San Francisco, Orange County and San Diego, making it tougher to attract venture capital here.

Participants at the roundtable agreed that one of the L.A.’s greatest resources, its research universities, remain largely untapped. Establishing a closer bond between universities and biomedical companies could provide the industry with the boost it needs, they said.

Kumar Patel, UCLA’s vice chancellor of research who would oversee the Mann-funded research institute, conceded that, as a public institution, UCLA has more institutional layers than a private university like USC.

But he defended the school by pointing out that Mann is proposing a business relationship, not just a simple donation, and as such there are lots of details to work out.

“This relationship comes with a large number of strings, if you want to call them that. Not all of them are straightforward,” said Patel.

He also stressed that UCLA is capable of forming ties with the business community. For example, the university this year joined entrepreneurs in forming a private plant-genetics company called Ceres Inc. Because that deal was less complicated than the one Mann is proposing, it was easier to work out.

Frank Wazzan, UCLA’s dean of the school of engineering, the person who has worked most closely with Mann to reach an agreement, refused to discuss the negotiations other than to say, “We’ve made a lot of progress.”

Neal Sullivan, USC’s vice provost of research, attributed USC’s faster pace to a “leaner and meaner” bureaucracy and to the entrepreneurial style of the university’s president, Steven B. Sample.

In USC’s case, Mann’s gift was technically accepted when he and Samples shook hands. That just left the details, such as who shares in the institute’s intellectual property, to be worked out by the staff.

USC has already appointed an interim director to its institute. While it will initially be housed in temporary quarters, a newly built home is slated to be complete in two to three years.

“The seed’s been planted and it’s begun to sprout,” Sullivan said.

The institute will provide the university’s engineers, biologists, neuroscientists and clinicians a chance to develop useful biomedical products, and share in the royalties under a complicated formula that also benefits the institute and the university.