Grant to help E.L. business, MSU prof perfect new silicon-based particle
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An East Lansing-based company came closer to its goal of helping an MSU professor commercialize his product with a $100,000 award from a statewide competition.
InPore Technologies was selected for the SmartZone Award as part of the Great Lakes Entrepreneur’s Quest, or GLEQ, Statewide Business Plan Competition, a contest to determine the most promising business plans for start-up companies.
Eighty-four companies applied, with 21 applications submitted to a panel of venture capitalists from across the country. The award was funded by Ann Arbor SPARK, a company focused on making Ann Arbor attractive for business expansion.
InPore is working with MSU chemistry professor Thomas Pinnavaia to produce a platform for Pinnavaia’s creation, Silapore particles, said Michael Brooks, vice president of business development at InPore.
“We’re in the process of commercializing this technology,” Brooks said. “The technology itself involves using silicon-based particles, like sand, run through a series of processes.”
The particles will be blended with plastics to improve several characteristics of the material, Brooks said.
“It can make plastics stronger, cure faster and more fire retardant,” he said. “There are some big advantages to being able to use the product.”
Brooks and InPore CEO Gerry Roston have been working with Pinnavaia for several years to create the platform and have a pilot plant on campus producing small quantities of the product. Brooks said he hoped the first application for the product would be used for wind turbine blades.
The investment by Ann Arbor SPARK started the fund with returns on 30 investments made just a few years ago, SPARK vice president Skip Simms said. He said InPore showed the most promise of all the contestants.
“They won the award because they showed they were the most likely to succeed with their business plan,” Simms said.
Jeff Smith, a project manager with the East Lansing’s Technology Innovation Center said the award is outstanding to the area’s efforts in technology.
“It says a lot about the efforts in the region and speaks volumes about the type of new, ground-breaking technologies making their way from the testing grounds of Michigan State University to full-blown commercialization,” Smith said.
The award will be beneficial to InPore’s reputation and potentially bring more investors to the project, Brooks said.
“It’s a big boost for us in name recognition,” he said. “And the $100,000 is needed for product testing, market planning and just to develop the business at a larger level.”
Simms said the investment in InPore will pay off in the long run.
“We believe InPore will be successful,” he said. “And when they are, they will repay the award and we can invest in other promising companies.”
The product will be useful in many walks of life, especially in the energy industry, Brooks said.
“This material, the basic product platform, doesn’t exist anywhere else right now,” he said. “We have high hopes for it.”
Commentary
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Eliot Singer
(06/30/10 10:49am)Report
I am delighted for Professor Pinnavaia and hope his research does turn into a profitable venture. However, as a critic of East Lansing government’s incessant propaganda, I feel compelled to remind people that this is just some seed money for an invention that is still far from attracting big-league venture capital, and that even inventions that do attract big-league venture capital have only about a one in ten chance of ever turning a profit. At least this seed money is more serious than the penny-ante stuff at the taxpayer-subsidized, money-losing, so-called Technology Innovation Center, but let’s not allow the hype-machine to blow it out of proportion.
East Lansing is going through difficult financial times, along with the state and the country. With cutbacks at MSU, state government, etc., the reality is grim for the foreseeable future. The people running East Lansing don’t like to talk about that, and they certainly don’t want to talk about the terrible job they are doing about slippery sidewalks or irresponsible landlords who neglect their properties, and a host of other problems that could be solved for little or no cost to taxpayers if they took a problem-solving approach to government instead of a public relations one. For years, the agenda in City Hall has been to imagine some glorious, upscale, transformation of East Lansing, and little matters like the bursting real estate bubble and hard economic times have only increased their ardor. So, every time there is anything that shows a glimmer of economic development hope, and often when the glimmer is only in the eye of the hypster, there is big press, then when nothing comes of it, of course, that goes unmentioned. I know a people who are convinced East Lansing/Lansing has been selected for Google’s high-speed Internet experiment, when we are just one of the applicants, because of the way the story has been spun. If we get (or already have been, for all I know) rejected, don’t expect a press release.
Here is why this matters, along with the basic credibility gap that happens with little boys who cry wolf. City Hall continues to push for, and commit tax dollars to, high risk development projects—the latest proposal for the failed East and West Village, the unending push for City Center II, which was always based on wishful thinking not a viable balance-sheet, building more and more residential units, despite the glutted market, etc. The excuse for this is the hype that a local economic boom, with an influx of well-heeled people, is just around the corner. We can certainly hope Professor Pinnavaia’s invention, or something else, does bring well-paying jobs into the community. But acting as if possibilities, and impossibilities, have already succeeded is magical thinking and a threat to the financial solvency of the city and its residents.
In my real world, I am about to walk to campus and will pass, in the course of two blocks, four houses for sale, one of which, owned by a developer (formerly a rental with some delightful State News people as tenants), has been empty for almost four years (another for two years), not to mention a landlord-neglected, nuisance rental about which city government refuses to do anything, that drives down property values and makes the for-sale houses even harder to sell. I will be walking over dangerously broken sidewalks, for which the city can be held liable if someone gets injured, that should have been a priority to fix when the government was flush and wasting money hiring consultants for its fantasy projects, sidewalks in such bad shape, joggers with strollers are forced into a curvy, poor visibility, street with reckless drivers taking short-cuts through the neighborhood, and on which parents cannot teach their children to ride a bike. When East Lansing and the local press are willing to give equal time to news stories about this reality, then I will join in the celebration of what I hope, for once, is an invention that is not just the invention of the public relations folks.