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By: D.C. Denison of   By the time the University of Massachusetts at Boston officially opens its Venture Development Center this morning, professor Robyn Hannigan hopes to have her laser system unpacked and her lab's mercury analyzer working.
Hannigan is excited by the prospect of developing her new company, GeoMed Analytical. It will be the first faculty-run firm to be launched in the new $8 million incubator, designed to nurture start-up companies that will turn UMass-Boston research into profitable products.
"This is a great platform for us," said Hannigan, chair of the university's Environmental, Earth and Ocean Sciences department.
The center, which will be launched today in a ceremony expected to draw such local political and educational luminaries as Mayor Thomas M. Menino and Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust, is also a high-profile platform for UMass-Boston. The sleekly modern 18,000-foot facility, with bright sunflower yellow walls, is a stage for UMass-Boston to shout its ambition to be more of a major research university in a city dominated by global research brands such as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"This says we're in the game," said J. Keith Motley, chancellor of UMass-Boston. "This center will take us to the next level."
The university is also hoping the center, located in the middle of its Dorchester campus, will help it recruit entrepreneurial-minded faculty, give student interns valuable start-up experience, and, in an era of declining state support, turn faculty inventions into sources of revenue.
"I'm really excited about the innovations that will come out of here," said Motley, who helped raise the $8 million to establish the center, "but the bottom line also matters to us."
Located in a former cafeteria, the Venture Development Center (already being referred to as "the VDC") has four well-appointed "wet" labs for life sci ences research, two computer labs, and plenty of glass-enclosed conference rooms and "collaboration spaces."
"We're trying to make it easy for people to run with ideas here," said William Brah, executive director of the center, as he walked around the facility this week.
Brah has so far attracted four young firms to set up shop in the center.
Hannigan's company, GeoMed Analytical, will be developing techniques to detect metals in medical samples. Symmetric Computing will develop advanced supercomputing applications for the life sciences industry. Anthurium Solutions Inc., a software company, is building tools to connect digital workers around the world.
DPixel, based in Milan, represents the funding end of the start-up equation. The venture investment fund will use the center as a base from which to scout for strategic partners for its portfolio companies. Dan Phillips, an entrepreneur who has run four venture-capital-backed software companies, will keep an office at the center as an "entrepreneur in residence."
Resident partners will pay the VDC a monthly fee of $1,250 per office and $3,750 per lab. All of the firms will collaborate with UMass faculty and offer internships to students.
Brah said he doesn't expect the center to be fully occupied for three to five years. "We've been very picky about who we work with," he said. "We're only interested in companies that will bring multiple benefits to the university," including bringing in research funds, offering internships, and generating revenue from patents and licensing.
Gary Matkin, dean of continuing education at the University of California at Irvine and author of the book "Technology Transfer and the University," said: "It's a very appealing concept, a university incubator. But to be successful, it takes a lot more than space and a motivated university."
To Matkin, the success of the VDC depends on the ecosystem the university is able to create around it.
"You're really working across two cultures, academics and business, and you need a lot of help to make that work," he said. "They are going to need excellent managerial resources, for example, and sources of funding. Otherwise these early projects won't go anywhere."
And then there's the intoxicating, inspiring success of research-oriented schools that have profited from companies like Akamai Technologies Inc. of Cambridge (MIT) and Google Inc. (Stanford University).
Yet UMass-Boston officials, for their part, stress that the Venture Development Center's goals are much bigger than financial return on investment.
"Innovation tends to leak out of a university," Brah said. "If the VDC keeps some of it happening here, that's a victory."
D.C. Denison can be reached at
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