Page 22 - Innovation Delaware 2019

KURT FOREMAN
to helping streamline the processes through which new companies can settle here, and to making existing firms’ growth opportunities greater. He appreciates the strong relationships
between people in the technology community and their willingness to share resources to create a vibrant ecosystem.
He uses the example of Wilmington PharmaTech, a Delaware Technology Park-based company that began in 2003 with two employees and a wet lab. (A wet lab is a lab space designed with special safeguards to prevent or mitigate spills of hazardous substances.)
Earlier this year, the company committed to adding 139 new jobs
and four new buildings to help manufacture active ingredients that go into clinical drug-therapy trials. In a sign of Delaware officials’ willingness to connect with and assist entrepreneurs, Wilmington PharmaTech’s expansion was aided by a state incentive program.
“There’s a lot of good relationships in the area between the tech folks,” Foreman says. “We want to reinforce that they can grow here in Delaware.”
Further support for that effort
comes from the Biden Institute at
the University of Delaware, which is committed to promoting the issues former Vice President Joe Biden focused on during his years of public service. A great example of the institute’s influence and impact came last fall when it sponsored an event that brought together state government officials, university execs, real estate developers and investors to discuss potential projects throughout Delaware. When state Policy Director Albert Shields addressed the gathering, he told everybody to get up from their tables and go sit somewhere else, the better to mix things up.
“He said, ‘You all need to be talking to each other,’” says Cathy McLaughlin, the Institute’s executive director.
In a lot of ways, they already are. ID
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