$13.3 million in state bonds will finish building
Major developments are in the works at Innovista, USC’s multi-million dollar knowledge-based economic development project.
Just three weeks after state legislators approved the final $13.3 million in bonds for building completion, USC was also awarded a three-year grant for a total of $387,000 from the federal government to boost Innovista’s business startup programs.
The $129,000-per-year grant comes from the Department of Commerce’s University Center Economic Development Program. The Economic Development Administration distributed a total of $1.2 million among ten schools, including UNC-Chapel Hill and Mississippi State, to support entrepreneurship and job creation in order to boost their regional economies.
USC’s grant will be used to create the Innovista Product Realization Center (IPRC) — a product-perfecting and manufacturing office to be housed in the USC/Columbia Technology Incubator. Innovista director Don Herriott sees the future IPRC as the next step in expanding the project’s business startup services. Innovista began co-operating an entrepreneurship office with the Technology Incubator in April. So far, the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technological Innovation (CETI), operating on $240,000 of research funding, has acted as a market analysis service for startup companies, most of them affiliated with USC.
“This grant (for the IPRC) expands the role of [CETI],” Herriott said. “The idea would be to get someone who has a project already proven from a technical point-of-view to the point where a consumer would actually want to buy their product. We expect at least 50 percent of customers (will have) ideas that originated at the university.”
The grant is another drop in the bucket for the Innovista project, which received its final $13.3 million from the state in June, despite criticism of the project’s slow growth. Innovista was expected to begin developing two private buildings in addition to the Discovery I and Horizon I research facilities, which together represent an investment over $107.8 million. However, contracting and management troubles in 2009 put off the construction dates on Discovery II and Horizon II indefinitely. Herriott said the remaining $13.3 million will be used for labs and offices on the first and fourth floors of Horizon, which currently remain unfinished. Whether construction for the private buildings will even begin within the next ten years remains undetermined, but Herriott says the focus of Innovista has changed since those building plans anyway.
“It forced us to reevaluate,” Herriott said. “By the time I was hired to develop strategic plan for Innovista, it had been more of a real estate plan. The amount of space we have is adequate, so we don’t need to focus on buildings. The focus then became entrepreneurship and how to recruit. In a generation, I would like to see a Fortune 500 company headquartered in Cola, but that can only happen if they were born and bred in the Midlands.”
So far, companies affiliated with Innovista employ over 1,700 people, including technology companies through IT-oLogy and the Nephron Pharmaceuticals plant in Cayce.