City embraces high-tech jobs

A January 2005 groundbreaking is planned for the $15 million federally funded, cooperative project at the former Missouri Farmers Association campus at 524 N. Boonville Ave. Architectural renderings for the first phase were completed and approved by the Southwest Missouri State University Board of Governors last month, and the federal financing is in place, said Jim Baker, SMSU assistant to the president.

The Jordan Valley Innovation Center is a consortium of SMSU and national corporations that perform highly technical work, ranging from classified research on national security issues to polymer coatings to implants used for improving vision. The center, tentatively scheduled for a summer 2006 opening, should employ 70 to 100 people when complete.

“We’ve got a lot of people pushing us to go faster, but we can’t because there’s a lot of state processes and all the other stuff,” Baker said. “But I think we’re really getting close to getting the final release on the money, getting everything set up, putting all the financing packages together and doing all the behind-the-scenes things that we need to do.”

Recruiting results

The list of companies signed on for the project continues to grow.

According to the center’s Web site, www.case.smsu.edu, 12 private companies and public groups are listed as center affiliates, including Brewer Science Inc. and Eyes of the World LLC, both based in Rolla, and Crosslink Polymer Research of St. Louis.

Closer to home, the SMSU Center for Applied Science and Engineering plans to move in. CASE Director Ryan Giedd said the center has a strong purpose for businesses.

“The big issue is intellectual property,” he said. “We have a unique model in that we try to give patent rights back to the company rather than keeping them all here at the university, and that’s very unusual for a university to do. That’s a big draw because they don’t use any of their patent rights if they come to work with us, and they can collaborate with university professors on projects and not lose their patent rights.”

Giedd added that the university would get royalties from whatever products are created as a result of work done at the center.

Keith Strasser, director of alliances for Brewer Science, said the company has had a relationship with SMSU for more than a decade.

“We’ve worked with them on a variety of research and development projects,” he said. “The Innovation Center came as a result of all those years working together and trying to find ways to commercialize materials research out of the university. The attraction was that there was a need to create a center to commercialize materials, commercialize products, create jobs and create new companies, utilizing both private and university resources. We’ve really been in on it since it was a gleam in somebody’s eye.”

Eyes of the World LLC works to create intra-ocular lenses, which can be implanted to combat the effects of cataracts.

Other groups committed to the project include Atlanta-based Applied Systems Intelligence Inc., the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.

While funding from the U.S. Department of Defense has been easily secured, Baker said bringing it to Springfield is slow going.

“Our biggest problem is just the lapse in time it takes from when we get the financing to when we get the place open,” he said. “The problem is just getting that bad boy open.”

The center is planned in two phases. The $8 million first phase, which comprises 43,500 square feet among two high-rise buildings, will house the research and development areas, including a clean room and laboratory space, while the second phase would use the technology developed in phase I’s facilities for manufacturing and prototyping purposes.

“We’ve been actually planning the second phase of this while we’ve been waiting to get the money released for phase one,” Baker said. “We have a really good idea of what phase two will look like, so while phase one is going on we’ll be working on the financing for phase two.”