With a team of researchers spread coast to coast, Nereid Biomaterials had a few options when looking for a place to set up a base of operations.
One of the founders of the startup that develops environmentally friendly, ocean-degradable materials works at the University of California Santa Barbara, another at the University of Rochester in New York, and a third at the University of Rhode Island.
In the end, the availability of lab infrastructure at URI’s Narragansett Bay Campus was a deciding factor.
“We’re kind of national, so with the fact that the Ocean Technology Center [at URI] was available to us, and was so accessible to my lab, it made a lot of sense to base [Nereid] here,” said Melissa Omand, a principal investigator for Nereid and a URI associate professor.
That’s exactly what state economic development officials want to hear as they look to capitalize on the so-called blue economy, the mix of various sectors such as energy, technology and defense with connections to the sea that some estimate could reach a regional value of more than $4 billion by 2027.
Indeed, the Ocean Technology Center has grown into a small but mighty resource, according to URI leaders and companies based there.
The center hosts several companies, but it needs more space and resources to meet its lofty ambitions, says Bethany Jenkins, interim vice president for research and economic development at URI.
But those ambitions have been severely blunted.
That’s because a consortium of regional academic institutions, government agencies and businesses learned in July that it had been passed over for a large chunk of federal funding that would have gone a long way to paying for the development of the Ocean Technology Center and a wide range of other blue economy initiatives.
The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration did not pick the Rhode Island-based Ocean Tech Hub – one of 30 federally designated regional technology hubs – to receive a slice of $504 million in grants awarded to a dozen other tech hubs nationwide.
It’s a decision that left some in the Ocean State feeling particularly spurned, with former Gov. Gina M. Raimondo serving as U.S. commerce secretary.
Hub officials had applied for about $64 million to finance plans to boost the regional blue economy, including creating a “smart bay” where undersea and maritime technologies can be invented, prototyped and tested.
Now consortium members – including Rhode Island and Massachusetts universities, government agencies, labor organizations, research labs, incubators and blue technology companies – say they’ll have to cut back on ambitious projects designed to attract and grow blue technology companies in the Ocean State and surrounding region.
At URI, the EDA funding would have allowed the university to develop more lab spaces at the Ocean Technology Center and “tailor them so that commercial members could have a presence at the university,” Jenkins said.
Additionally, there were plans to beef up intellectual property development at URI.
Without the EDA funding, “it’s a loss of that kind of accelerant,” Jenkins said.
FEELING THE STING
Regional officials had high hopes when President Joe Biden’s administration announced last October that it had selected the Ocean Tech Hub of Southeastern New England – a joint Rhode Island-Massachusetts effort spearheaded by the R.I. Commerce Corp. – as one of 31 regional innovation and technology hubs eligible for hundreds of millions of dollars of funding.
Documents submitted to the EDA said economic development officials envisioned the area becoming “the Silicon Valley of Ocean Technology.”
The hub includes 16 institutions and organizations, with additional support from another 20. Some of the formal members are Brown University, 401 Tech Bridge, the New Bedford Ocean Cluster, IBM Corp. and the R.I. Department of Labor & Training. Two blue tech companies, Bristol-based Jaia Robotics Inc. and North Kingstown’s Infused Innovations Inc., also belong to the consortium.
The University of Rhode Island Research Foundation is one of the partners feeling the sting of the EDA rejection, according to Executive Director Christian Cowan.
In its funding application, the Ocean Tech Hub outlined the foundation’s “Smart Bay Initiative” as one of seven major component proposals.
Though named for Narragansett Bay, the grand vision for the program among local blue economy leaders went far beyond the waters of the bay.
The project called for a region where undersea maritime technologies could be invented, prototyped and tested in southern New England waters and in a “digital twin” of the marine conditions and geography along coastal areas from Providence to Cape Cod, including Quonset Point and Newport, Block Island and New Bedford.
“People started asking us to name it ‘Smart Ocean,’ which starts to get a little too big,” Cowan said. “But it certainly reached out to the ocean.”
Now the vision has gotten much narrower, reduced to piecemeal demonstrations and programming.
While the enthusiasm for the Smart Bay Initiative hasn’t died, Cowan says, hub partners are pausing to reevaluate just how – and if – it can transform the region’s waters into a high-performing economic engine.
Concrete plans for the Smart Bay, for instance, are for now limited to the coast of one city: Newport. In late August, the foundation worked with IBM and Verizon Communications Inc. to install research and development infrastructure such as underwater sensors between the Naval Station Newport and Fort Adams 2½ miles away.
While that installation provides blue tech companies with some opportunities to deploy and test their maritime technology, it’s far from the originally planned network connecting to existing systems at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod roughly 30 miles from the mouth of Narragansett Bay.
“The plan was to integrate their data and their sensors in with Rhode Island,” Cowan said. “One of the big concepts for the tech hub was this collaborative consortium between Rhode Island and Massachusetts.”
This isn’t the first time that the EDA has overlooked Rhode Island – despite Raimondo’s strong connections to the state.
In September 2022, the federal government denied the URI Research Foundation’s application for Build Back Better Regional Challenge funding, which would have provided up to $100 million for blue economy efforts.
At the same time, Gov. Daniel J. McKee had set aside $70 million in COVID-19 relief money for blue economy investments to match the Build Back Better grant. When the grant wasn’t approved, the COVID-19 relief money wasn’t allocated, either.
The double rejection isn’t lost on Cowan.
“From our point of view, it’s discouraging,” he said. “It’s the second time that the EDA has passed on the large award for the ocean economy. … They were both really big applications.”
[caption id="attachment_475463" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]
SEAWORTHY STARTUP: From left, Christine Smith, special projects director at the University of Rhode Island Research Foundation, and Pete Rumsey, the foundation’s chief business development officer, talk with Juice Robotics LLC co-founders Christine de Silva and Matt Jewel at the Ocean Technology Center at URI. De Silva is CEO and Jewel is chief technology officer of the company that produces stackable ocean sensors that use a special epoxy resin that allows the sensors to be used at great depth.
PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
‘STILL BULLISH’
From the EDA’s point of view, the Ocean Tech Hub hasn’t been rejected.
In response to a Providence Business News inquiry, the agency said in a statement that all of the federally designated tech hubs had strong applications, forcing the administration to make “extremely hard decisions … to accommodate the limited resources we have.
“The most competitive applications described concrete activities to produce technology products and services to capture global market share. They described how commercial success would both create high-quality jobs for communities in their region and how it would benefit national and economic security,” the agency said.
Also, just weeks after awarding grants of $19 million to $51 million, the U.S. Department of Commerce allocated $500,000 for tech hubs that missed out on the first round, including the Ocean Tech Hub.
But rather than directly benefiting the blue technology companies and research institutions involved in the hub, R.I. Commerce has indicated that it will largely use that funding to scramble for more capital.
Daniela Fairchild, chief technology officer at R.I. Commerce, remains optimistic that the initiatives outlined in the Ocean Tech Hub’s funding application will still come to fruition, albeit on a longer timeline.
“We’re still bullish, hopeful, that if additional dollars come through, we’ll move everything,” Fairchild said. “This is bigger than that one grant. Not getting the larger-dollar grant … changes the tactics that we’re putting in place, but the structure of the work, the things that we’re looking for and that we’re continuing to move on are all still broadly the same.”
Commerce officials say they’re encouraged that EDA officials visited Rhode Island in early August to meet with local blue economy innovators. The visit included a ride in Bristol Harbor on a motorboat powered by an electric outboard motor manufactured by Rhode Island-based Flux Marine Ltd.
They also toured the spot in Bristol for a proposed robotics lab that would allow blue tech startups to build and test robot designs as they work toward commercialization. Now in limbo, the so-called Blue Robotics Lab was one of the key components – along with the Smart Bay Initiative – of the Ocean Tech Hub’s application for funding.
Other components included a program designed to connect entrepreneurs with venture capitalists, a workforce development program for students, a clean energy testbed in New Bedford to focus on offshore wind and renewable energy, and a collaboration among URI, Brown and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth to provide access to fresh and saltwater testing tanks and technical assistance for businesses.
R.I. Commerce officials acknowledge getting these initiatives off the ground will require much more legwork now.
But Fairchild says the agency is already working on other grant applications – at least one through the U.S. Small Business Administration and another through the EDA again, this time via its Good Jobs Challenge. That program will allocate five to eight grants from a $25 million fund dedicated to workforce training. A decision is expected this winter.
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CHECKING IT OUT: R.I. Commerce Secretary Elizabeth M. Tanner toured the Unity Park mixed-use development in Bristol in early August with federal Economic Development Administration officials to see the proposed space for the Blue Robotics Lab, a key component of the regional Ocean Tech Hub.
PBN PHOTO/KATE WHITNEY LUCEY[/caption]
R.I. Commerce Secretary Elizabeth M. Tanner says she is determined to get more funding for the Ocean Tech Hub. “If it was all over, [EDA officials] wouldn’t have come here a month later,” she said.
Tanner accompanied EDA Deputy Assistant Secretary Cristina Killingsworth and EDA Tech Hubs Deputy Director Annie Colarusso on their visit to Rhode Island in early August.
“They’re here to say, we believe in you, we want you to advance,” Tanner said afterward. “And the conversation I had was, ‘Here’s some advice and tidbits on what [we] think you should do so that you can get the dollars the next time.’ ”
Tanner and Fairchild say it’s hard for EDA officials to provide more exact expectations ahead of the presidential election in November, when the outcome may lead to a change in direction for the Department of Commerce.
The EDA also noted that while the federal tech hubs program is authorized to receive $10 billion under the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors and Science Act, it has so far received just $541 million.
“At the current appropriated level, we will only be able to deploy tens of millions of dollars in about a third of these Hubs – far short of the envisioned initial investments,” the EDA told PBN in a statement. “The $541 million available for the Phase 2 competition came far below the $2 billion demanded across hubs’ proposals.”
If the program receives additional appropriations, the agency says, all tech hubs can apply to fund new or previous proposals.
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PRODUCT PLACEMENT:
Juice Robotics LLC, which operates at the Ocean Technology Center at the University of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay Campus, is developing stackable ocean sensors that connect like Legos. They are made of epoxy resin with no air bubbles, allowing the sensors to be used at ocean depths.
PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Despite its lack of funding, the Ocean Tech Hub has paid off in other ways, local leaders say.
University partnerships have strengthened since the hub’s formation almost a year ago, Jenkins said, and the consortium provides “an almost unprecedented opportunity to have academic, industry and commerce come together.”
And consortium members haven’t been completely discouraged, either, saying they’re working with what they have to establish or expand the proposed initiatives.
Ian Estaphan Owen is co-founder and CEO of Bristol-based Jaia Robotics, which uses torpedo-shaped robots to conduct seafloor surveys, identify hazards and make environmental assessments for its clients.
Owen says that while Jaia didn’t have a company-specific funding request in the Ocean Tech Hub’s proposal, the startup and other companies like his have benefited from increased connections in the consortium – a benefit that was apparent when EDA representatives visited Bristol.
While riding on the motorboat powered by Flux Marine, Owen was introduced to Mark Parsons, founder of the nonprofit New Bedford Research and Robotics. While the boat slipped quietly through the harbor, Owen and Parsons chatted about potential collaborations.
“What it’s allowed us to do is expand our network and make connections to a whole host of different companies we may not have naturally made contact with,” Owen said of the Ocean Tech Hub. “It’s all about relationships.”
As a member of the hub’s steering committee, Jaia also has a newly amplified voice in the region’s blue tech sphere, Owen says.
“For a small business like ours, it’s incredible to be part of that,” he said.
Still, Owen says, an essential role of the Ocean Tech Hub remains unfulfilled and will need more resources to become a reality. While the connections fostered under the hub have value, what the companies really need is a place to test their technology.
Owen hopes to see resources more akin to the URI Research Foundation’s Smart Bay Initiative come to fruition – aquatic spaces “where you’ve got instrumental ranges, where you can look at what’s happening in the water” and test models, he said. These resources would not only provide for existing companies in Rhode Island, he notes, but attract new businesses into the Ocean State – businesses such as Nereid Biomaterials.
Working from a lab at URI’s Ocean Technology Center, the Nereid team is developing plastics that will be biodegradable in seawater, unlike most plastics that fail to decompose in the cold, dark ocean environments, even plastics that claim to be biodegradable.
As a result, massive amounts of discarded fishing equipment, or “ghost gear,” accumulate in the ocean each year. Other times, marine plastics are an unfortunate byproduct of efforts to better understand the ocean.
The plan is for Nereid’s materials to be used in products ranging from ocean sensors deployed by scientists studying climate change to traps and netting used by fishermen.
Omand, the URI professor and a principal investigator for Nereid, says efforts to foster relationships throughout the blue economy could be enough to make a difference in drawing and retaining companies to the region.
In fact, many of Nereid’s prospective customers have expressed appreciation for face-to-face interactions and knowledge of the area’s unique challenges, she says. Keeping Nereid in the Ocean State “probably could boil down to the relationships that we cultivate,” Omand said.
That said, funding from the EDA could have made a big difference, too.
“The Ocean Technology Center, the availability of that space on campus was why we decided to have our company’s physical base here,” Omand said. The Ocean Tech Hub getting millions of dollars to develop ocean-related industries, she said, “would affect our ability to stay based in Rhode Island, and branch into potentially a larger space, or capitalize on other kinds of blue economy connections.”
