UMass, state team up to support startups
Two years ago, Carol Skelly wanted to expand the IT firm she had started in her Portsmouth home. Her primary needs, she said, were affordable space and new workers who know the programming language used in her company’s software.
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Skelly’s search led to the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Center, a business incubator in Fall River where entrepreneurs can access low-cost work space and college interns to help grow their startups.
“[The center] had typical advantages that you find at a high-tech business incubator,” said Skelly, CEO and founder of Iatek, which designs software to enable non-technical employees to operate Web sites and intranets.
A 20-minute drive from Providence, the center houses 13 young companies that had salaries and contracts totaling $9 million last year, according to John R. Miller, director of operations at the center. In recent years, the five-year-old program has graduated three companies – including American Advanced Power in Providence.
People involved in growing Rhode Island’s technology sector say that the state lacks a facility that matches the Fall River incubator in size and concept, and a similar resource here would improve the state’s technology infrastructure.
“I think there is a significant need for a facility of that nature [in Providence] – particularly in life sciences,” said Richard G. Horan, executive director of the Slater Technology Fund, which invests in biotechnology and IT startups in Rhode Island.
Mass Development, the quasi-public agency focused on economic growth in Massachusetts, built the 60,000-square-foot incubator space for $14 million in 2001 and leases most of it to the center, Miller said.
The center has a wing dedicated to research laboratories where startups can seek guidance from university faculty and develop new products. The wing includes labs for chemical research, acoustics, prototype assembly, textiles, telecommunications and electronics. Labs are also available to established companies and government agencies.
Recently, Miller said, the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport has worked with researchers there to develop products with its underwater mapping technology.
In the modern building’s second wing are individual offices for the startups, which pay as little as $200 per month for a cubicle and up to $2,500 for a larger space to do business, Miller said. Also, most of the companies employ interns from UMass Dartmouth who major in everything from marketing and public relations to engineering and chemistry.
Ocean Server Technology, a three-year-old startup at the center, has recently offered a job to an intern and expects to begin turning a profit this year, said Robert Anderson, co-founder and president of the company.
Ocean Server is currently developing an “autonomous underwater vehicle,” a 60-inch unmanned submarine that runs on a high-powered lithium battery at a speed of up to 6 knots.
“The reason that we are in Fall River is that we wanted to be somewhere between Newport and Woods Hole,” Anderson said. “Aside from the physical resources of the building, there are professors here that have relationships with both the commercial companies and the Navy that are helping us out.”
The incubator operates with an annual budget of $1.9 million, Miller said, with $1.3 million coming from the state and the balance from the university. And to keep helping new businesses, the program aims to house startups for no longer than three years.
Slater currently operates a relatively small, 7,500-square-foot, biotechnology incubator at 4 Richmond Square in Providence’s East Side, Horan said. In existence since June 2003, the facility now provides laboratories, meeting rooms and a common kitchen for six companies.
Horan said Rhode Island needs more biotechnology incubator space due to the high cost of building and renting the facilities. “That capital cost puts a facility of one’s own out of reach for a typical startup company,” he said, “and the only way they can get up and running is if they have access to an appropriate amount of space in a larger managed facility.”
Slater uses income from its investments – made with annual sums from the state budget – to operate its incubator. “It’s been a successful undertaking,” Horan said, “but if we had the resources, we would want to take it to a larger scale.”
