Real-time Matchmakers - Georgia Department of Economic

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Adding Value:
Chris Paulk of Paulk
Vineyards, left, and
COI for Agribusiness
Director Donnie Smith
GEORGIA’S CENTERS OF INNOVATION OFFER
HELP TO THE STATE’S KEY INDUSTRIES
By Ed Lightsey
BLACK SIGATOKA IS A DISEASE THAT STRIKES BANANA TREES IN ASIA, Central America and
South America, often destroying entire crops, a situation that resonates with one South Georgia manufacturer.
In Atlanta, a small group of information technology experts investigates the possibilities of health-related devices that can hook up to smartphones; near Albany, a wine producer seeks new markets for his products; and in Macon, a manufacturer needs 100 new employees with very specific skills and needs them fast.
The companies dealing with these real-life situations
all sought the assistance of one or more of the state’s
Centers of Innovation (COI) – six sites with a combined
17 employees tasked with the mission of helping build
profits and jobs for entrepreneurs, small companies and
giant corporations.
The centers, part of Georgia’s Department of
Economic Development, have been quietly at it for several years, with the kind of success economic developers dream of. And it may be the best is yet to come, as
word spreads of the centers and their work.
Georgia’s Centers of Innovation for Aerospace
(Eastman), Agribusiness (Tifton), Energy (Atlanta), Life
Sciences & IT (Atlanta), Logistics (Savannah) and
Manufacturing (Gainesville) may be identified as part of
the cities attached to their names, but the experts in these
locations belong to the entire state and cheerfully admit
you’re not likely to find them anywhere but on the road.
WWW.HERBPILCHER.COM
Access
The fungus Black Sigatoka is of particular interest to
Eric Rojek, vice president of sales for Thrush Aircraft, a
maker of crop dusters. “We build airplanes that work in
agriculture,” Rojek says. “They are flying tractors. Right
now 60 percent of our business is international, and our
No. 1 customers are the banana growers. The banana
world is Central America, northern South America and
Asia, and that’s where we supply aircraft.”
The fast and agile Thrush can swoop into a banana
grove surrounded by jungle and drop its load of
Sigatoka-killing spray and be back at the hangar in
minutes.
“The banana growers have been very good to the
airplane business because, number one, if they don’t
spray, they don’t produce,” Rojek says.
“One of the things we’re learning as a company in
Georgia is that there are these wonderful branches of
Centers of Innovation that can help our organization.
So a company like ours that sort of bubbles in agribusiness and aerospace, but also in logistics finds that the
Centers of Innovation are wonderful resources.”
Delivering his airplanes to foreign lands can be
tricky, especially when his shipments are funded by
the U.S. Export-Import Bank and require his cargo to
be delivered by ships flying the U.S. flag. “First of all,
U.S. [cargo] ships are not abundant,” he says. “We go
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to where the crops are grown, and
that’s not always near a major port.
Logistics is a very unique challenge we
deal with.”
Costas Simoglou is the director of
Atlanta’s Center of Innovation for
Energy, which played a major role in
landing the Swiss company SolarMax
in the city of Norcross in Gwinnett
County.
“The key moment came when the
company linked up with Georgia
Tech,” says Michael Ernst, a company
spokesman. “I think the initial help
was to give us access to a network of
resources to get us up and running
from the R&D [research and development] point of view, which was the first
section of the company to open here.”
SolarMax site selectors were looking at Boston and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), but
Atlanta and Georgia Tech won out.
“The company is headquartered in
Switzerland, and they were looking for
an East Coast city in terms of [flight]
connections to Europe,” says the COI’s
Simoglou.
“At the end of the day, the overall
package, things like the presence of a
strong university, workforce and cost
of living came into the equation.
Atlanta’s a very strong international
hub providing easy access to Europe
and back.”
SolarMax will open for production
in mid-July with 40 employees, including scientists, technicians, sales and
administrative personnel. The company will manufacture photovoltaic
inverters for solar panels. The devices
convert DC current to AC for use in
buildings.
Connections
Yet another project involved a call to
faculty and engineers at Georgia Tech –
this one from John Zegers, director at
the Center for Manufacturing.
“A small company in Dahlonega
was facing difficulties in their manufacturing process,” recalls Zegers, who
says the company makes tiny sensors
no bigger than a flea. “The sensors
required curing in ovens, and they had
to be removed periodically and meas-
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INNOVATION
Who’s Who
Donnie Smith
Director
Center of Innovation
for Agribusiness
[email protected]
229.391.6882
Steve Justice
Director
Center of Innovation
for Aerospace
[email protected]
478.308.3097
Glen Whitley
Director
Center of Innovation
for Life Science and Information
Technology
[email protected]
404.962.4066
Page Siplon
Director
Center of Innovation
for Logistics
[email protected]
912.963.2551
Costas Simoglou
Director
Center of Innovation
for Energy
[email protected]
404.962.4033
John Zegers
Director
Center of Innovation
for Manufacturing
[email protected]
770.531.6350
ured,” Zegers says. “The step became a
bottleneck in the manufacturing process, and only about five a day could be
made.”
With early indications pointing to
brisk sales, the manufacturer feared
the orders could not be filled in a timely fashion. Then the call was made to
Georgia Tech. “Here’s a company that
has developed a revolutionary polymer-based sensor that is essentially
imbedded into the product that you
want to monitor the life of,” Zegers
says. “You can picture the rubbery jacket that goes around all the cables inside
a piece of equipment.” Equipment not
unlike that inside a nuclear power generator, he adds.
“You mold this sensor into this
product, and when the equipment is
running as it should, you wave a wireless device over the equipment and it
will tell you how much life is left in the
equipment.” Zegers says the process is
being studied for use by large global
electronics companies, as well as the
Department of Defense and the Department of Energy.
On The Move
Steve Justice is happy to note he is
rarely where you think he might be,
and it’s just part of the job.
“We are a virtual COI, because
aerospace is all over the state,” says
Justice, director of the Center of Innovation for Aerospace. “We have an
office in Eastman, and our host institution is Middle Georgia State College.
We have an office in Atlanta. But we’re
rarely in our offices – usually on the
road working with universities and
companies.”
Justice sees himself as a kind of
facilitator or matchmaker that pairs
Georgia businesses with the technology or manpower needed to make them
successful. “We had a company in
Macon that got a new contract and
needed 100 people,” he says. “Of the
100 new workers, the company needed
25 to be entry-level. That was easy. We
contacted our technical colleges and
university system [to provide the entry-level workers].
“Then they needed 50 people with
15 years experience and 25 with 15
years-plus experience. We put out the
request throughout the state through
the technical college system and contacted retiree groups and connected
the retirees with the company. Some of
those retirees were interested in working another couple or three years.
Bottom line: In about six weeks, the
company had 85 people, enough for the company to launch
the contract and move forward with it.”
Alliances
WWW.KOMICH.COM
Chris Paulk already had a successful family-owned wine
producing company, Paulk Vineyards, in South Georgia
when he began casting about for new uses for the skin, pulp
and leftover juices of his muscadines. “It was then that I first
heard about the Center of Innovation for Agribusiness being
established,” Paulk says. “We had a research need and were
looking for a new process for a new product.”
duction process for a concentrated extract from our muscadine farm.”
The COI for Agribusiness partnered with Paulk and the
University of Georgia (UGA) and the OneGeorgia Authority.
“The partnership made the grant happen, and that expanded our product line,” Paulk says.
Smith got involved when a French scientist came to the
area with some ideas about muscadines he wanted to test.
“He said they had searched the world over and found that
Georgia muscadines had a certain quality he thought could
heal burns and wounds a lot quicker,” recalls Smith.
Growing Sector: COI for Life Science and Information Technology Director Glen Whitley
Paulk sought out Donnie Smith, director of the COI for
Agribusiness in Tifton. “Chris came in, and he needed some
information and needed to know who to contact,” says
Smith. “We are a center for connectivity. We connect the
client to the resources they need.”
What Smith did, according to Paulk, led to the development of a new product, concentrated muscadine syrup. “In
2006, we were awarded a grant from the OneGeorgia
Authority for testing and development of a commercial pro-
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“He’s still doing that research now. Not only that, but
he’s doing some muscadine tests with mice he thinks can
be used in the fight against obesity.” Smith says he is constantly in touch with ideas that can add value to Georgiagrown crops. “We grow everything in Georgia from apples
to zucchini,” Smith says. “Right now we’re looking at the
production of olive oil, and blueberries have surpassed
peach production.”
Smith checks in on Paulk’s muscadine production from
time to time and is constantly looking for other agriculturerelated products to put on the market.
“We’re on the UGA Tifton campus and we have access
not only to the UGA research scientists but also those of
Georgia Tech, and we work with Fort Valley State University
and Georgia Southern University,” Smith says.
Going Forward
cost. (Some grants are shared with the scientists or consultants who provide research and/or solutions.)
Outreach is very much on the minds of the innovation
center directors. For example, Page Siplon, director at the
Center of Innovation for Logistics in Savannah, serves on the
U.S. Secretary of Commerce’s Advisory Committee on
Supply Chain Competitiveness.
Mark Lytle, former director of the Georgia Centers of
Innovation, now vice chancellor for economic development
at the the University System of Georgia, emphasized the outreach efforts.
www.georgiatrend.com I JUNE 2013 I 67
RUSS BRYANT
The former Center of Innovation for Life Sciences in
Atlanta is now the Center of Innovation for Life Sciences and
Information Technology, less than a year old. The marriage of
healthcare and IT industries seemed a natural, as Georgia and particularly the Atlanta
area have grown rapidly in the use of digital
electronics in surgical suites as well as
patient records, according to Glen Whitley,
director of the COI.
“One of the reasons for the combination
or the creation of this modified center was to
take advantage of all the IT already going on
here and see if we can help stimulate additional growth in that area,” says Whitley.
“There is a huge market and business in
the region for IT. We’ve got some very large
companies with a presence here. I think the
Metro [Atlanta] Chamber and our department identified over 200 companies involved in healthcare IT in Georgia, putting
the state in a strong leadership position.”
If there is a cluster of such businesses
here and a lot of talented people working in
them, what might the next trend be?
Whitley and the other COI directors are
guarded when discussing what their clients
have on their drawing boards, fearing, they
say, too much disclosure could damage new
product development. But some concepts,
without specifics, can be shared, Whitley
says. Like the idea of health checkups on the
go.
“One of the things I’m looking into, in
partnership with the metro chamber, is
mobility,” he says. “What’s going on in the
mobility world? Those same strengths in
software and engineering that help IT also
underpin mobility as you find more and
more people with health-related devices Increasing Outreach: Page Siplon with the Center of Innovation for Logistics
that can hook up to your smartphone.”
“I think it was very difficult, even a year ago, for people to
In the past, the directors of the six Centers of Innovation
get their arms around what the centers did and how they
have typically worked in near anonymity on projects that
helped companies. But the companies they helped certainly
may not seem to receive much publicity. Part of that was likeknew it, and you could certainly hear about the success stoly due to the nature of economic development efforts, which
ries. I don’t want to say they were invisible, but they certainoften require discretion.
ly were not well known.” Part of his effort, he says, was “to
But the COIs have been given the mission to spread the
bring together the thousands of things the centers do for peoword of their presence and willingness to help create success
ple and companies.”
for the entrepreneur or the CEO, and do it largely without