Places, Please: Local Entrepreneurship Facilities Take Center Stage for Most TBED Strategies

Whether you call it an incubator, accelerator, technology center or innovation zone, most communities actively engaged in promoting tech entrepreneurship can point to a building or group of buildings that houses some of those efforts. These facilities increase the success of budding tech firms by providing some combination of low-cost space, shared resources, business assistance, intellectual property assistance, and access to capital. 

 

For incubators alone, the National Business Incubation Association tallied more than 1,400 public and private facilities as of October, 2006.

 

And each month there are more announcements of construction of a new center or expansion of an existing effort. Here are just four recent examples of the cornerstone of many TBED strategies:

• The Colorado Springs Technology Incubator will be moving into its new 23,000 sq. ft. facility, thanks in large part to a $450,000 grant from the federal Economic Development Administration. The center formerly had only 4,000 sq. ft. available for tech firm tenants.
• Louisiana Tech University is using $250,000 from the University of Louisiana system to establish a Technology Business Development Center (TBDC). Working in conjunction with the schools existing Enterprise Center, the Center for Entrepreneurship and Information Technology, and many school departments, the new TBDC will provide information, consulting services and educational opportunities for entrepreneurs, emerging business ventures and technology-oriented businesses.
• The John Adams Innovation Institute provided a $150,000 grant to the Massachusetts Medical Device Development Center to seed a proof-of-concept project for development of a technology incubator. The center hopes to capitalize on the engineering school of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell and clinical research conducted at University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. 
• Purdue University will nearly double its technology business incubator space at a cost of $14.5 million. The third incubator building in the Purdue Research Park will add 113,000 sq. ft. of space onsite, while another 40,000 sq. ft. satellite incubator is being built in New Albany. There are already two other satellite incubators in the Purdue system.