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Three years ago, John Criscione said he was on a tight deadline to find low-cost incubator space for his growing medical device company.
The Texas A&M University associate biomedical engineering professor had just landed a $750,000 federal grant to develop and test an implantable heart-stimulation device.
But at the time the Bryan-College Station market didn't have space to meet his needs, so Criscione ended up moving the fledgling company called CorInnova Inc. to a small business incubator in Fort Worth.
"There was nothing in this area that was acceptable, really," Criscione said. "Our engineers were here, and we didn't want to move."
The Bryan-College Station market hasn't offered low-rent space to start-ups in about seven years, local officials said.
But those companies soon will have options: 1,500 square feet of incubator space marked for information technology-related businesses is set to come online in downtown Bryan's Fibertown in late March. The Texas A&M University System also is incorporating an estimated 12,000 square feet of wet and dry labs and office space in its Texas Institute for Preclinical Studies (TIPS) facility, set to open in 18 to 24 months.
The TIPS center will be located at the northeast corner of Discovery Drive and Raymond Stotzer Parkway in College Station.
That 117,000-square-foot facility also will include a large-animal hospital, imaging center and surgical laboratories.
Intellectual sourcing
Still, Research Valley Innovation Center General Manager James Lancaster is looking for more. The Research Valley Partnership formed the innovation center last year to support local start-ups.
Jim Joyce, assistant vice president for research administration at the Texas A&M Health Science Center, said the center is in discussions with Lancaster about providing incubator space at its new campus in Bryan.
Lancaster said the time is right for new incubator space because local economic development and Texas A&M University officials are collaborating more than they did in the past.
"We're now tapping into the greatest source of intellectual property in the area -- the university," Lancaster said.
Texas A&M, simultaneously, has put a greater focus on commercialization of on-campus research, having spun its Office of Technology Commercialization into a larger, system-operated program, Lancaster said.
The innovation center is adopting a different approach to incubator space than most cities, homing in on various market sectors as opposed to providing one general incubation facility for start-ups.
The Fibertown incubator, for instance, positions information technology start-ups atop a massive convergence of fiber optics networks. In turn, that could generate long-term business for the Downtown Bryan-based business park. And the TIPS facility will surround preclinical start-ups with lab space and an environment geared toward their specific industries.
Lancaster said some cities create incubators to revitalize an area. In the case of Bryan-College Station, Lancaster said, there isn't a large contiguous space that people are intent on redeveloping.
"And the diversity of new emerging technology is so broad," Lancaster said. Start-ups do not derive the same benefits from being lumped together in one facility for all sectors that they would in an environment made specifically for their individual market sector, he said.
Future incubator efforts could include collaboration with Texas A&M on a student incubator and a general-engineering incubator, he said, adding that the innovation center has not yet started work on those incubators.
History lesson
Local officials with a stake in economic development are not sure how many successful start-ups the area lost when Bryan-College Station didn't have incubator space available.
Dennis Goehring, economic development director for Bryan, said he helped operate two incubators from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s.
"Lynntech was really one of our first incubator prospects," Goehring said. "They have been super-successful."
Arbin Instruments and Net Near U are just a couple of incubator tenants from that time frame that still exist.
Lynntech Chief Technology Officer Oliver Murphy said the company's space in the early 1990s, while not particularly plush, gave his company legs.
"In 1990, we were in receipt of a number of contracts from government agencies, but we had no place to go," Murphy said. "Rather, there were places to go, but we couldn't afford any of them."
Lynntech now develops a broad range of fuel cells for commercial and military applications. The company has a 50,000-square-foot office in South College Station and 130 employees.
Lancaster said the newer incubator space will also provide support and guidance to start-ups -- something its predecessors did not offer.
As Texas A&M University continues to spin off companies from within, Lancaster said he is seeing an influx of business owners with potentially great ideas but no concept of how to run a business.
Criscione said he feels that way about his company, CorInnova.
"Incubators are perfect for helping people like me who have great technology skills but are not entrepreneurs," he said. "We really need to be able to partner with them, to really lean on them for the business side."
Joyce said the innovation center will become increasingly important as higher education continues to change.
"Funding from the state is becoming more difficult to get," he said. "In order for institutions to grow, we're relying on private funding."
Commercialization, Joyce said, is the best way to increase the university's institutional funding.
"We're right on the verge of taking advantage of what A&M has got," said Jim Pillans, manager of the Brazos Valley Small Business Development Center.
Todd McDaniel, president and CEO of the Research Valley Partnership, said the merging of life sciences infrastructure at A&M and the private sector could put Bryan-College Station on the map for related companies looking to expand.
"But to achieve real economic development success, you have to be hyper-competitive," McDaniel said. "The best thing we can do is help to grow our own."
Meanwhile, Criscione said his business might not be a total loss for the area.
"TIPS is an ideal spot for developing a medical device," Criscione said. "We still do studies on our device here at A&M. We just build the devices in Fort Worth. It's a bit inconvenient."
• Holli L. Estridge's e-mail address is holli.estridge@theeagle.com.
