Three Decades Later, LIHTI Still Lighting Biomed’s Fuse
Early in 2012, Marc Alessi – an attorney who had served three terms in the New York State Assembly – followed his entrepreneurial brain and founded SynchroPET, a biomedical-imaging company based on three patents from Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Unfortunately for startup CEOs like Alessi, 44 percent of new businesses close within their first three years, according to the national Small Business Development Centers, a function of the U.S. Small Business Administration.
The good news: Those that launch with the help of a business-incubator program have a survival rate of 87 percent after five years. The reasoning, borne out by experience, is that incubator features – including reasonable rents, expert mentoring, shared meeting spaces and the comradery of like-minded early-stage firms – focus entrepreneurs and their teams on building a business, not just tweaking an invention.
Looking to bring these improved odds to Long Island, Stony Brook University in 1992 invited then-Gov. Mario Cuomo to cut the ribbon on the Long Island High Technology Incubator, the university’s first official business-incubator program.
Thirtysomething years later, not only have 71 innovative, job-creating firms graduated from the LIHTI program, but four other industry-specific incubators have been added to the SBU mix – more than 100,000 square feet of specialized infrastructure lifting startup enterprises in deep-tech vertical domains including biotechnology, clean energy and artificial intelligence (not to mention very-difficult-to-navigate food-and-beverage sectors).
The LIHTI concept actually dates back to 1983 (about 24 years after the world’s first official business incubator opened in upstate Batavia). That’s when SBU was first recognized as a Center for Advanced Technology (in medical biotechnology) and when an ambitious tenant first took space in a university facility hastily equipped for that firm’s specific needs.
Patrick Hession, at the time the university’s manager for advanced technology, lobbied for funds to build a structure to expand on the idea. Nestled on grounds not far from the Stony Brook University Hospital parking lot, the building would be ready to serve startups in the biomedical-product sector (a prevailing theme that continues today).
What we know today as LIHTI didn’t officially arrive until that early-90s ribbon-cutting. And it wasn’t until 2015 that Alessi came along with his BNL patents, taking advantage of LIHTI’s space and expertise to develop useful positron-emission tomography products. (The former assemblyman recently graduated his successful company from the incubator and is now executive director of the Business Incubator Association of New York State, for good measure.)
While serving as SynchroPET’s chief operating officer (starting in 2016), I was able to relish the nourishing environment of the high-technology incubator, which today has 19 resident firms. Individual spaces are fine-tuned to their occupants, with each company’s chances of success amped up by modern meeting spaces – superb for investor and partner meetings – and the unique services of a world-class research university.
For example, SynchroPET needed broad bandwidth Internet, since we regularly transferred 1,000-gigabyte files of medical images. Quickly, LIHTI responded.
Seven years ago, Yacov Shamash, then SBU’s vice president for economic development, described LIHTI as the “godfather” of regional business incubators – and a secret weapon for keeping next-generation talent on Long Island.
Today, Andrew Wooten serves as LIHTI’s executive director. A proverbial new sheriff in town, he’s held the position for only three months – but he has a background that would have won a Golden Globe for Best Incubator Leader, if there was such a thing.
Before joining LIHTI, he spent three years at the City College of New York, where he helped raise $35 million for economic development. Prior to that, he ran innovation commercialization programs for Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Baylor College of Medicine and Arizona State University.
At each stop, Wooten was able to significantly grow commercialization revenue, increase the number of startup ventures and execute some of the largest technology-commercialization transactions in the institution’s history.
In addition to managing LIHTI’s startup-incubation services, Wooten is also providing contract incubation services for designated spaces inside the innovation-rich Stony Brook Research and Development Park. And new strategies are being devised to better leverage the broad array of resources of a SUNY Flagship University and its sprawling economic-development ecosystem.
Knowing the importance of business-incubator systems, it will be exciting to watch these new strategies gel.