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The Innovation Accelerator, the newest occupant at Scott Technology Center, is like an intellectual dating service for technology wizards, aspiring entrepreneurs and established businesses.
“You can’t just throw anyone together,” said Executive Director Traci Hancock. “You want personalities to match and be productive.”
Ken Moreano, executive director of the technology center, said Hancock and her four-person staff are a good match for his enterprise, which includes an incubator for early-stage startup businesses and for the Kiewit Institute.
The latter is a partnership of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Nebraska at Omaha that educates engineering and information technology students. The institute and technology center share a campus with other businesses at 72nd and Pacific Streets near Aksarben Village.
The Innovation Accelerator is working with 40 or 50 federal grant recipients across the country, including one in Lincoln, which are developing new businesses or technologies, Hancock said. Eleven federal agencies award small business-focused grants every year, she said. The Innovation Accelerator itself receives federal funding, although Hancock declined to say how much.
She and her staff find answers to questions, set up meetings with experts, identify potential executives, or do anything else to help grant recipients succeed, Hancock said.
Tom Chapman, director of entrepreneurship and innovation at the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, said the presence of the Innovation Accelerator is a boost for new ideas.
“Innovation is important to the economy in Omaha and the country,” he said.
Hancock and Moreano are both working to create opportunities for forming high-growth businesses, and they are good partners for each other and for the chamber, Chapman said.
He said he first encountered the Innovation Accelerator several years ago, when it basically was just a concept trying to identify its role. Since then it has evolved into an active enterprise engaging with various constituencies.
“From my perspective, the partnership with Scott Technology Center is great. Any time you get government, academia, corporations and the Kiewit Institute together, it’s good ... as we try to grow an ecosystem here,” he said.
Hancock said she has a stable of 25 or 30 “resource companies,” established businesses that provide advice, technical expertise or other assistance.
And this is where her dating service/matchmaker role comes into play.
“One (startup) company is run by two professors who just want to stay in their lab and make nano particles,” Hancock explained. “So we find someone to take the nano particles and commercialize them.”
“Commercialize” is tech-speak for bringing something salable to market. Hancock and Moreano also like to sprinkle their conversation with terms such as “low touch,” “high touch” and “pain points.” Translation: limited involvement, close involvement and problems.
Moreano said the Innovation Accelerator’s presence at the Scott Center already has produced concrete results.
One of Hancock’s early success-story companies, VSee.com, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is collaborating on two pilot projects in Omaha related to health care and education, Moreano said.
VSee.com, a product of Stanford University, has a smart, sophisticated, flexible, souped-up videoconferencing software program. Moreano, Hancock and others at the Scott Center use it just to keep in touch and interact with one another at the office.
With no more equipment than a laptop, a person can conference with up to 12 people. You type in their addresses and their pictures pop up on the computer screen, à la “Hollywood Squares.”
The program also has chatting capabilities, so you can send a note to one person on the screen without the other conferees seeing it. Plus, you can transfer bulky files to the computer of a person on the screen simply by clicking and dragging the file to that person’s picture.
Hancock said VSee.com’s method of transmission makes it “ultra secure,” so it’s used by a number of government agencies.
The Innovation Accelerator moved into the Scott Technology Center last summer, but its relationship with Omaha dates back nearly two years. That’s when its East Coast-based CEO, John Pyrovolakis, who has degrees from New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, visited the city.
“He saw the potential synergies and started forming relationships here,” said Hancock, who previously was director of the Bio Nebraska Life Sciences Association. Bio Nebraska was formed in 2005 as a nonprofit trade association for the development and growth of Nebraska’s bioscience industry.
Moreano and Hancock said they have a shared mission of promoting American competitiveness in a global economy, Hancock primarily on a national scale and Moreano by fostering innovation locally.
The Innovation Accelerator brings exposure to and a chance to interact with some of the country’s leading scientists and technologists, Moreano said.
“It shows what’s possible and what it takes.”
Contact the writer:
444-1050, pat.waters@owh.com
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