Partnership Helps Businesses Get Started and Grow
Published Jan 24, 2008
The Research Valley doesn’t host poker games – that’s for regions along the Mississippi River – but it does lay its cards on the table. The Research Valley is biased toward business.
“There is intense competition among areas, states and nations, to grow their economy,” says Chuck Martinez, director of innovation services for The Research Valley Partnership, the consortium of groups charged with attracting new business. “Most economic development corporations help companies locate, stay or expand in particular communities. Central to this is having someone looking out for you – like a mentor-protégée, but on a bigger scale. Now there’s a new flavor emerging.”
Past efforts in traditional incubation are giving way to the concept of acceleration. Companies get the same access to support systems, but it all happens (like so much else these days) faster.
The Innovation Center is just such an accelerator.
Martinez describes the Innovation Center as a cultivator of homegrown entrepreneurship. Through its relationship with Texas A&M, the Innovation Center helps grow new companies, both commercial firms and nonprofits.
“We want The Research Valley to be a hotbed for innovative companies,” he says.
One such company is StarRotor Corp., which manufactures its signature engine.
Co-founder Dr. Mark Holtzapple, a chemical engineering professor at Texas A&M who teaches thermodynamics, says the engine is three times more efficient than a car engine. For example, a car may get 30 miles to the gallon. A car with a StarRotor engine would get 90.
The company currently sells compressors and expanders – the two parts of an engine equation – to drive cash flow. But the big deal is the engine.
StarRotor got assistance from the Partnership. “We were discussing a joint venture with a Chinese com pany,” Holtzapple says. “The Research Valley Partnership lined up everyone they needed to meet, brought in the mayor and rolled out the red carpet for them.”
The Partnership also helped them apply for state grants and has invested in the company. Not surprisingly, Holtzapple has praise for The Research Valley.
“They’re signaling they want us to be in the community, so we can flourish here,” he says.
“Our goal is to be the largest private employer in the region.”
Story by Paul Hughes
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