RI-CIE’s Brendan McNally, a matchmaker for innovators and marketing gurus

A bright idea for a new high-tech product, a laboratory, a factory, an investor, a patent lawyer, a market researcher and a publicist: Bring them all together, and a new company has a chance to bring a much-needed product to market.
Brendan McNally brings them all together.
McNally is the first director of the Rhode Island Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (RI-CIE), founded in April 2009, with offices at Davol Square, the heart of Providence’s nascent “knowledge district.” He is the winner of the Providence Business News 2010 Innovation Mentor Award.
The center was founded with the mission of helping inventors find and marshal the various forms of expertise needed to bring a new product to market, particularly in the areas of life sciences and technology. The young center is a collaboration between Brown University, the R.I. Economic Development Corporation, the R.I. Science and Technology Advisory Council and the Slater Technology Fund.
McNally, who works with innovators, sometimes refers to his job as a matchmaker. “When I can help someone think about something differently, or open a new avenue, or make a connection that helps them, it is a great day,” he said.
Among McNally’s tasks is listening to a person run through a dress rehearsal for his pitch to investors or other resources. “The mentoring piece is critical,” McNally said. “You can buy and read business books, but the success rate always goes up with mentoring.”
Among the innovations that McNally has helped nudge toward fruition are a new type of Petri dish for life sciences research; a mobile application that displays information about products by scanning bar codes and a new variation of the familiar stick-on label.
“Rhode Island’s big assets are its institutes of knowledge creation, like the universities and hospitals,” McNally said. Until the center was founded, he added, “Rhode Island [did not have] a support community to bring the knowledge economy to market and help it to grow.”
In the absence of the resources that RI-CIE provides, he said, people who came up with innovative product ideas – particularly in technology and the life sciences – “would have to poke around on their own to find the resources to help them, or they would go elsewhere, like Boston or Connecticut or New York or other centers with help for research startups and investment capital.”
How is RI-CIE doing this work? One way is by having offices where people can come for specific guidance from McNally. Also, the organization holds office hours on alternate Fridays. A panel of about 10 practitioners, including lawyers, professional communicators and others will listen to short pitches from people with ideas for products. After the pitch, the questions, answers and suggestions begin to fly.
“Sometimes people don’t even know what questions to ask,” said McNally. “We have had some really bright innovators who have no experience in the business world. During the office hours, we have had lots of interaction that has been helpful.”
Last summer, RI-CIE held an ominously named Entrepreneur Boot Camp for 14 early-stage ventures. Conducted by Derby Management of Boston, the boot camp was a day and a half of immersion in important topics that a startup needs to deal with, like identifying markets, building a staff, assembling data to build credibility and more. Each of the young ventures also got individual feedback. This fall, RI-CIE is launching an incubator program that will surround young ventures with mentoring programs, education, networking, and community support.
McNally points with pleasure to the progress made by two innovators who have worked closely with RI-CIE. Andres Douglas, a 2009 graduate of Brown University, created a company called Bakodo that is developing a mobile app that can scan a bar code and bring up information such as nutrition facts and reviews of a product. As it is planned, the device could also allow retailers to send promotions to users’ phones.
Another RI-CIE user is Max Winograd, president of NuLabel Technologies Inc., who, McNally said, “spent every day of 2009 and most of 2010” at the RI-CIE offices, laying the groundwork for his company. NuLabel now has offices in Pawtucket. (Winograd was named the 2010 Rising Star Innovator by PBN.)
An early beneficiary of RI-CIE’s help is Jeff Morgan, a biologist who founded a new company to market his three-dimensional Petri dish.
McNally said as an innovator in the knowledge economy, Rhode Island is well behind Massachusetts and other high-tech hot spots. But, he added, “Rhode Island has a lot of the right elements, starting with smart and talented people.” He added, “The other big piece that is missing in Rhode Island is investors and funding sources.”
Noting that RI-CIE is still very young, McNally added, “We have to show that we have the pipeline of people and resources before investors will flock to Rhode Island. After that, it will snowball.” •