It covers seven acres and is the length of nearly two football fields. It's Innovation Depot, Birmingham's business incubator that has turned the old Sears building, an eyesore for years, into a fresh, open space that is the home to 40 of Birmingham's newest businesses, including a dozen in biotech and life sciences.

The facility has the capacity to house between 60 to 65 companies, but Susan Matlock, president and CEO of Innovation Depot, isn't worried about reaching capacity. "We are exactly where we expected to be at this point, and where we told the bank we would be as we moved in, so we are absolutely on target," she says. With approximately 100 applicants a year, filling the remaining space is simply a matter of time.

And for the companies that have already moved in, the space is a definite hit. "I love the building," says Don Petersen, chief scientist of Biological Innovations, a company that does research and development on bone graft devices. "There's a feel for high tech and the cutting edge things we do here. The industrial architecture, windows and natural lighting create an ambience, and there's a synergy here. I can talk to people about the technology they're developing. I develop a carrier material, a device you actually implant in a person. Combine that with someone developing a vaccine and it makes a really nice product." Petersen says that meeting possible partners and discussing options with them is much easier when they are located in the same building.

Raymond Thompson, president of Vista Engineering, agrees. "If we were in our own building, we would be in a warehouse-like building with offices up front. We'd be sequestered and alone. In an incubator, it's just the opposite. Here, we are around other people all the time. We see and talk to each other and keep up with some of the methods they use for marketing themselves. For a young company, marketing and building an infrastructure for networking is important to us. So being here, we get to develop a network and see how others are doing their network development. It's a double boost. It keeps life interesting for us! We get to meet other people, and it keeps our brains sharp."

UAB is a partner in this endeavor, which has combined the former Entrepreneurial Center and OADI Technology Center at UAB into the one location. "Innovation Depot owns this facility, but we are a partnership with UAB," explains Matlock. "We wanted to create a new name that truly represents the bringing together of OADI and the Entrepreneurial Center." The 140,000 square-foot facility includes 20,000 square feet of wet lab space, five training/conference rooms, and kitchens and a break room for employees. Common areas are furnished with retro, modular furniture, specially designed for comfortable laptop use. Wireless access is provided inside as well as outside, where dining areas will soon be available. A rooftop terrace provides a clear view of the city skyline.

Many of these amenities would be pleasant for any company, but it's the attention to detail in the lab spaces that make this facility such a plum location for biotech and other high-tech startups.

Devon Laney, vice president of client services for Innovation Depot, explains how the new space is an improvement over the facility OADI used to have. Every lab now has deionized water, and now each individual space has its own electrical panel as well. In the former facility, if a piece of lab equipment caused a breaker to throw, it took some time to locate the thrown breaker and get electricity back. Now the panel is in the lab space and such problems are easy to rectify. When there are bigger electrical issues, the facility has a 24-hour back up generator. Specially marked red outlets indicate where critical equipment should be plugged in to access that generator when needed.

Each lab space has two rooms that can be used for offices as well. "We found in the old facility that many companies used one of their office spaces for a cell culture room," says Laney. So now air, gas and vacuum tubes are installed in one of the 'office' areas if it is needed for that purpose.

Matlock estimates that it will take about 18 months to fill out the remainder of the space. "And then of course it'll take us, we figure, about two years to get the dynamic back in place of pushing people out the door," she explains. "That tends to happen naturally. At the Entrepreneurial Center we didn't want people to be with us more than five years. What would happen is they would typically graduate between three and four years, because they would outgrow us, or they would get acquired. At OADI we didn't have those kind of requirements, because when you are dealing with biotech and life sciences companies, there's a longer time-to-market issue, so it doesn't happen as quickly. We don't want to do anything premature for any company. It wouldn't make any sense to nurture somebody for four years and then arbitrarily kick them out. You have to work with the companies where they are."

Innovation Depot may be new, but the effort to help grow new businesses, especially high-tech and biotech companies, has been underway for some time. "Susan (Matlock) and her group have done a great job of planting the seed here," says Thompson. "Hopefully we can grow that in Birmingham to be the engineering/technology/biotech area that we have the facilities, the location, and the intellectual ability to be. With UAB here, with Alabama and Auburn, Georgia Tech just down the road and Vanderbilt just north of us, we can draw on a huge intellectual infrastructure to bring in new people. This is the seed to building a really vibrant city."



June 2007