Tag: Innovation

UD, Delaware Technology Park and Discover Bank Partner on New FinTech Building at STAR Campus

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UD, Delaware Technology Park and Discover Bank Partner on new FinTech Building at STAR Campus

25 NOVEMBER, 2019 | PETER BOTHUM | UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE

Once a nearly blank canvas inviting imagination for what the university of the future may look like, the University of Delaware’s Science Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) Campus is realizing such transformation on a daily basis. Combining top academics and research with industry and community partnerships, a renewed future is shaping in real time at this intersection of discovery, education and innovation, driven by a bold vision for positive impact on the world.

UD, Delaware Technology Park (DTP) and Discover Bank will partner on the construction of a new building that continues the STAR Campus’s march into the future, adding a building block that taps into the evolving world of financial services technology — commonly called FinTech — with an eye on growth for Delaware.

Like the previous construction on STAR Campus, the six-story, 100,000-square feet structure will bring various facets of an industry together under one roof, in this case the academic, business and governmental segments of the financial world.

“Working with DTP and Discover to strengthen Delaware’s growing FinTech sector, the University of Delaware is proud to participate in this public-private partnership, continuing development of knowledge and innovations that help drive our state’s economy,” said UD President Dennis Assanis. “Our University is a national leader in finance, technology and entrepreneurship, so combining our expertise and resources in these complementary fields will yield exciting opportunities for our students and faculty with meaningful impact on society.”

The new FinTech building will add immense value to Delaware’s growing prowess in financial technology. More and more financial services companies are morphing into technology companies. Global investment in FinTech-related companies rose from $18.9 billion in 2013 to $111.8 billion in 2018, according to a recent report by the Delaware Prosperity Partnership.

“We’re working hard in Delaware to support those entrepreneurs and innovators who will keep our state competitive in the 21st century economy, and drive new job creation,” Governor John Carney said. “We’re also good at working together in Delaware, and I am really pleased to see this kind of collaboration between the private sector and the University of Delaware. This partnership at the STAR Campus will help create a pipeline of skilled local talent, support our entrepreneurs, build on our strength in financial technology, and strengthen our economy over the long term.”

By constructing a hub where the financial services industry and academia intersect with technology and innovation, UD, Discover and DTP will contribute to the vitality of Delaware’s economy. UD’s research and instruction in data-related disciplines will create a highly capable workforce to feed the FinTech industry in Delaware, including the start-up businesses that will hatch, grow and spin out of the new facility.

The building will house:

  • Spaces for startups to develop and grow, managed by Delaware Technology Park. Tenants will have onsite access to business development resources and technical assistance.
  • Labs and centers associated within UD’s College of Engineering and Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics. These spaces will link strengths and resources from both colleges on topics such as financial analytics, cybersecurity, human-machine learning and data analysis.
  • UD’s Office of Economic Innovation and Partnerships (OEIP) will relocate its offices from the Delaware Technology Park’s Innovation Way location.
  • Delaware’s Small Business Development Center, which will be synergistically located to offer assistance to OEIP’s Spin In program. This program connects UD undergraduate students with community entrepreneurs and early-stage startups to give them an inside look at business innovation in action and a chance to apply what they’re learning in real-life situations.

“Delaware Technology Park is excited to launch a new building project on STAR Campus in conjunction with the University of Delaware and funded by Discover Bank,” said Mike Bowman, president and CEO of DTP. “It will contain faculty, students and entrepreneurs with outstanding data science knowledge and digital management competencies as well as support resources for business development and community education.”

The $38 million project will be funded via a favorable below market interest rate loan by Discover Bank to DTP, the owner of the building. UD will lease space in the building.

Discover Bank is currently exploring ways to partner with UD on research related to the financial technology needs of the bank that may include cyber-related technologies, and consumer data analytics, applications and behaviors. A national nonprofit focused on improving the financial health of communities, has partnered with Discover Bank to work with UD, DTP, entrepreneurs and the community on the utilization and testing of financial technologies to improve consumer financial health.

“Discover Bank is dedicated to building stronger communities, which is why we’ve championed this project with the Delaware Technology Park and the University of Delaware to expand economic opportunities, create jobs in financial services and FinTech, and promote financial health for underserved populations,” said Discover Bank President James J. Roszkowski. “The development at STAR helps us realize our vision of creating brighter financial futures for consumers as well as creating new opportunities for the business community.”

The building, which is scheduled for a 2021 opening, will mark the first sizable presence of Lerner College on the STAR Campus.

“This project will create an excellent opportunity for UD students to explore new frontiers in data-related disciplines including computer and information sciences, computer engineering and financial analytics,” UD Provost Robin Morgan said. “With a focus on setting up our students for success, the UD community will have access to new space for academic growth and the pursuit of employment opportunities in the continuously expanding FinTech industry here in Delaware.”

Potential plans and programs include a cybersecurity leadership center that would link Lerner’s cybersecurity management with the College of Engineering’s cybersecurity engineering and technology, a space for human-machine learning and social media data analysis and a multi-media studio.

Kurt Foreman

PRESIDENT & CEO

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Delaware: The Small State Big on Innovation

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Delaware: The Small State Big on Innovation

21 OCTOBER, 2019 | KURT FOREMAN | INDIA GLOBAL BUSINESS

Some of the world’s most transformative innovations got their start in Delaware. Centrally located on the East Coast of the US, between Boston and Washington DC, Delaware is known for its global leadership in science, tech and agriculture thanks to the track record of successful Delaware companies such as DuPont, which has operated in the First State for more than 200 years.

Thanks to Delaware Governor John Carney, two new business incentives will ensure that Delaware continues its storied legacy of business friendliness and innovation. The Angel Investor Tax Credit offers a 25 per cent tax break to individual backers who invest a minimum of $10,000 in a qualified Delaware company. Businesses eligible for the incentive must have fewer than 25 employees and engage in innovation as their primary business activity. This tax credit includes and is not limited to energy, food technology, cellulosic ethanol, materials science technology, nanotechnology, biotechnology, medical device products, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, biologicals, and chemistry.

The New Economy Jobs Tax Credit supports employers that add at least 200 new jobs in the state with an annual salary averaging $70,000, or 50 new jobs with salaries of at least $120,000.

Businesses are choosing Delaware because of its highly respected and trusted corporate law system; its enviable East Coast location, varied talent pool its commitment to diversity and ease of incorporation.

When you combine Delaware’s access to an exceptionally experienced and welcoming talent pool from some of Fortune 500’s most innovative companies, emerging entrepreneurs have the best of both worlds, as well as the wonderful quality of life Delaware has to offer.

Just ask research scientist, Sumedh Surwade, PhD. He joined Fujifilm in New Castle, Delaware after post-doctoral research at the University of Pittsburg and Oak Ridge National Lab.

He founded SAS Nanotechnologies and is developing a potentially transformative innovation – environmentally friendly, self-healing, anti-corrosive coatings. It’s not only a green idea, but it also has implications and applications for everything from aerospace to the marine industry. Industries spend billions annually on repairing or replacing corroded metallic structures; a planet-friendly, self-healing coating would revolutionise industries that use metal.

The brand name for the planet-friendly coating is Shobhation. Surwade and his wife named the coating after his mother, Shobha, a Hindi word that means Grace; they blended the name with the defining super-quality of the coatings “to inhibit corrosion” and came up with Shobhation.

SAS Nanotechnologies not only won top honours at a local chamber of commerce’s 2018 Swim with the Shark’s Entrepreneurial Summit, it also garnered one of the AkzoNobel Paint-the-Future Global Start-Up Challenge Awards in Amsterdam. The competition for this international honour is steep and just getting short-listed is an honour, let alone winning.

With several patents in the review process, Surwade could have started his new company anywhere, but he chose Delaware. Surwade thinks Delaware makes it easier to begin a business than other places he has been. Delaware’s strong talent science and tech talent base gave him the encouragement he needed.

“In my opinion, Delaware is a wonderful place to start a business. It is a welcoming and friendly state with extremely talented people willing to share and support scientists and engineers starting out on their own. The support and guidance SAS Nanotechnologies received has been essential to our success,” said Surwade.

Shobhation is now being reviewed by industry partners and potential customers for feedback. Based on their insights, the product will be further refined, inching closer to commercial launch. As a beneficiary of investment capital, Surwade says angel investor tax credits play an important role for science and tech start-ups. “Angel investment is essential in the early days of capital-intensive research. To complete the journey from innovation to bench, to prototype, to commercial scale, is labour and capital intensive. Angel investors make all the difference.”

Batta Environmental Associates found its way to Delaware through a different route. Company founder Naresh Batta arrived in the US in the mid- ‘70s from India to complete an MS degree in Chemistry at the internationally recognised program at the University of Delaware. He liked what he experienced here, and he decided to form his business Batta Environmental Associates in the university-based town of Newark, Delaware.

Since its inception, Batta has grown steadily both domestically and internationally with work in Mexico, the UAE and India. With a solid presence along the East Coast, Batta’s growth plans include expanding its Environmental Engineering and Consulting Services both state-wide and internationally.

Senior VP Neeraj K. Batta says Delaware is a great and safe place to raise a family with the opportunity to experience everything from exceptional parks, beaches, art and culture, with easy access to just about anywhere.

Although Batta Environmental Associates has not leveraged Delaware’s tax credit, incentives or strategic fund, Batta explains that some of their clients have.

“In fact,” says Batta, “Delaware’s Brownfields Grant and Low-Income Housing Tax Credits from Delaware State Housing Authority have enticed some of our clients to actually locate and build in Delaware.”

Delaware has something for everyone, from small-town charm to metro life, and it is one of the most affordable and accessible places to live along the East Coast of the US.

Kurt Foreman is President and CEO at Delaware Property Partnership.

This article was originally posted on the Delaware Business Times at https://indiaincgroup.com/delaware-the-small-state-big-on-innovation-india-global-business/ 

Kurt Foreman

PRESIDENT & CEO

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Q&A with Christina Pellicane, I-Corps Program Administrator

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Q&A with Christina Pellicane, I-Corps Program Administrator

7 OCTOBER, 2019

Why do you think the NSF I-Corps is valuable to starts-up in the science and engineering space?

The University of Delaware’s NSF I-Corps Sites provides grants of up to $3,000 and training to support team-based customer discovery research aimed at investigating the commercial viability and societal impact of a novel STEM technology or process.

Typically, academic researchers who begin down the path of commercialization never stop to ask themselves, “Does anyone care about my technology?” or, even more insightfully, “How does my technology solve a real problem in the world today?”

The I-Corps Site program provides a low-risk environment and a structured process to systematically validate (or invalidate!) components of a business model and ultimately determine whether the business has product-market fit.

Not only that, but the I-Corps site program also provides $3,000 in non-dilutive funding to get out of the building and talk to potential customers. This is an opportunity that didn’t exist for entrepreneurs even 10 years ago. If you wanted to start a startup, you had to bootstrap it or find an investor who believed in you. Academics are great at explaining how a technology works but I-Corps teaches them to learn why it’s valuable to customers.

How many train-the-trainer sessions have you conducted so far?

This cohort is our 15th and it’s the first we’ve done in partnership with the NYC Regional Innovation Node (NYCRIN). NYCRIN runs all of their regional programs as a train-the-trainer, which makes this collaboration very exciting. We’ve been able to train 12 fantastic adjuncts who all have experience as startup founders, CEOs, intrapreneurs or investors! Our bench of potential I-Corps Site instructors has dramatically increased this fall.

Having a larger bench of instructors is important for diversity and inclusion (67% of our current adjuncts-in-training are women or underrepresented minorities) as well as our capacity to train even more I-Corps Site teams going forward with highly-qualified entrepreneurship practitioners.

How do we measure the success of I-Corps?

Fail fast. Fail often. Failing isn’t something we usually celebrate at a university but, when it comes to entrepreneurship education, we do.

It’s important that success is measured by learning and not by validating what you thought might be true about your business model. From that lens, success is measured by talking to many potential customers about their pain points, pivoting and iterating and finally building a solution to a problem that the entrepreneur knows exists because they heard it repeatedly and directly from the voice of the customer.

In addition to measuring the number of customer interviews and strength of the business model, success is measured by the number of teams who received follow-on funding. A few of these funding sources are the NSF I-Corps Teams program, VentureWell’s E-Teams program, our Blue Hen Proof of Concept Program and our Summer Founders pre-accelerator program.

We strongly encourage I-Corps Site teams to apply for the national NSF I-Corps Teams grant, which provides a $50,000 grant and a longer, more intense Lean LaunchPad program.

Tell us more about Horn Entrepreneurship & I-Corps:

Horn Entrepreneurship serves as the University of Delaware’s creative engine for entrepreneurship education and advancement. Built and actively supported by successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders, Horn Entrepreneurship empowers aspiring innovators and entrepreneurs as they pursue new ideas for a better world.

Horn Entrepreneurship became an NSF I-Corps site in 2014 with the central aim of serving as an “Ecosystem Catalyst” for the university and the broader region. In the 4+ years post-award, the impacts and outcomes associated with the site suggest that this aim has been accomplished.

The National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (NSF I-Corps) site program provides specialized training and mini grants of up to $3,000 to help teams bridge the gap between academic research and product commercialization, University intellectual property, or any STEM-related technology. This program provides real-world, hands-on learning experience that improve the odds for successful products and processes that benefit society.

The entire Team will engage with industry stakeholders – including customers, partners and competitors. The team will also experience first-hand, the chaos and uncertainty of commercializing innovations and creating ventures.

This course will not teach you how to write a research paper, business plan or NSF grant proposal. It is also not an exercise to prove how smart you are in a lab / classroom, how well you use the research library, or if you can publish a paper. Rather, this course is about “getting out of the building.” You will spend a significant amount of time talking to customers and testing your hypotheses. You should not participate in the I-Corps program if you cannot commit the time to talk to customers.

Referenced webpages:

Blue Hen Proof of Concept Program: https://www.udel.edu/research-innovation/horn/venture-support/blue-hen-poc/

UD I-Corps Site: https://www.udel.edu/research-innovation/horn/venture-support/nsf-i-corps-sites/

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