Rose-Hulman Ventures (RHV) has aggressively identified opportunities to leverage its capabilities in cooperation with other colleges and universities, incubators, businesses, governments, cities and economic development organizations to pool resources to expand and create technology-based companies. In the past six months, Rose-Hulman Ventures hosted statewide and national forums and partnered with Purdue University to assist an Indiana technology company.

RHV hosted a leadership forum where community leaders and entrepreneurs from around the state identified specific opportunities to collaborate in building innovation-based businesses. The focused forum created greater awareness of regional development efforts from throughout the state and laid groundwork for co-investment and partnership opportunities.

“The potential educational, economic and technological gains for the entire state of Indiana are unlimited with this type of collaboration,” said Jim Eifert, president of Rose-Hulman Ventures. The participants at the forum were community leaders who are knowledgeable regarding economic development, entrepreneurial opportunities, and new business formation, according to Eifert.

David Becker, chairperson of TechPoint, the leading change agent for Indiana’s technology industry, had these comments about the benefits of the forum, “Based on my twenty years experience in the technology community in Indiana, this will go down as a landmark event.” Becker added, “It’s the first time we have gotten people together on a statewide level from Scottsburg all the way to Elkhart. It’s economic development. It’s major universities. It’s entrepreneurs. It’s companies all in the room at the same time. But more importantly, it’s sharing ideas, opportunities, and best practices.”

A partnership involving RHV, Purdue University and Griffin Analytical Technologies is an excellent example of the kind of positive synergies under way between academia and the private sectors. RHV is investing in Griffin, located in the Purdue Research Park, to help develop the technology from the prototype stage to a commercialized product ready for the marketplace. Griffin is licensing proprietary Purdue technology to deliver a miniaturized mass spectrometer to the analytical instrumentation market. RHV is lending expertise in specific areas such as manufacturability, performance optimization, minimization of power consumption, and production cost reduction.

RHV’s most recent method of seeking strategic partners was hosting a gathering of business incubation leaders, decision makers and related policy makers from throughout the United States and China. Rose-Hulman Ventures shared its technology-based model with 40 leaders in business incubation, capital formation and investment, economic development, business, government, civic and academia.

“We are at a point where it is important for us to look at best practices from around the country and around the world. That includes ways to refine client recruiting and screening, venture capital deal structure, business support and strategic relationships,” Eifert said.

All participated in a working dialogue to share related best practices in investment, incubation and innovation. Leaders from 11 states and China collaborated in this two-day event on unique approaches to new venture formation.

Dayong Wu, vice president of Tsinghua Business Incubator in Beijing, China said that with the globalization of the economy we are bound to find the channels to cooperate with each other. “Rose-Hulman Ventures is similar to ours [incubator], which is a university-based incubator. We have the same goals, which is to make the local economy the place of development,” he added.

Bonnie Herron is the executive director of Intelligent Systems Incubator in Norcross, Georgia, and chairperson of the National Business Incubation Association. “There are many models of business incubators. We are all here to discuss new models and new ideas. It is exciting to see where the industry is going,” Herron said.

Eifert added, “For Indiana and RHV to be successful in the implementation of the infrastructure for the ‘Innovation Economy’, we must take every opportunity to share best practices with our colleagues around the state, the nation and the world. The meetings of the past few months have given us a good start on this process of continuous improvement.”