Page 38 - Innovation Delaware 2021

WHY DELAWARE?
that started with funds from family and friends, that can make a difference.”
Public, Private Sector Collaborate for Growth
Another important piece of Delaware’s support system for growing companies: collaborations between the public, academic and private sectors. The Delaware Technology Park (DTP) is the result of this kind of collaboration. It’s a five-building, 40-acre installation in Newark that currently houses 54 companies ranging from multinational corporations to university spinouts. MIKE BOWMAN has headed DTP since its founding in 1998, and during that time DTP has assisted in the creation of more than 100 companies, 16,000 jobs and over $600 million of permanent investment and grant funding. In 2016, DTP expanded its domain to create incubator activities at the University of Delaware’s
nearby STAR Campus, itself a mixture of classroom, public service, research and entrepreneurial activities.
Currently, Bowman, whose purview is normally science and technology, is excited about STAR’s fintech future. A 100,000-square-foot fintech building, co-administered by the university and Discover Bank, is rising on the campus, with completion expected in November. “It will be the center of excellence for the East Coast,” Bowman says, noting that the emphasis, while partially on AI and machine learning, will also be about the management of big data, a growing commonality shared by the financial and health care communities.
“In addition to opening new avenues of workforce development, I think it’s important that the banking industry helps solve the problems of social inequities,” Bowman says, “especially in places that don’t have banks and credit cards.”
As with Vaddi’s Prelude, some of the companies that started their existence with Bowman at DTP have now gone over to Provine’s Delaware Innovation Space, where most tenants continued to work normally during the year of the COVID pandemic. “In fact, some were able to actually accelerate their development,” he says. He also noted that the number of new entrepreneurs in Delaware has “surged during the pandemic.”
The Innovation Space’s launch in 2017 was another example of a successful public-private partnership. “In one year, we got the state, one of the state’s largest employers [DuPont] and its largest higher education institution [the University of Delaware] to come together,” Provine says. “Think about doing that in California or New York. It would never happen there.”
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36 DelawareBusinessTimes.com