Click here for Part I & Part III

Developing today’s science- and technology-focused startups into tomorrow’s industry-leading companies

William Provine is CEO of the Delaware Innovation Space, a not-for-profit business incubator based in Wilmington. Developed in partnership with DuPont, the State of Delaware, and the University of Delaware, the Delaware Innovation Space seeks to fuel science and technology startups’ growth into industry leaders. The facility is located on the DuPont Experimental Station campus, where its multi-use lab space occupies an area of more than 100,000 square feet. Prior to his work with the Delaware Innovation Space, Bill spent 20 years at DuPont, where he eventually served as Director of Science & Engineering.

EDWIN WARFIELD: Can you walk us through how the Delaware Innovation Space supports startups?

BILL PROVINE: A foundational question on forming the Delaware Innovation Space is: Why even do it? Why is that needed? What is the strength of what we do that can help entrepreneurs? If you look back at the 200-year legacy experience within Delaware and the companies that have been created, I mentioned a few right upfront, but DuPont clearly—back in 1802, a French entrepreneur coming and landing on the banks of Brandywine, creating gunpowder, a huge number of product lines well beyond that—to Gore and Gore-Tex, which came out of Bill Gore, who was a scientist at DuPont and who found playing with those materials was an intriguing proposition. Actually, PTFE was a DuPont material that started the framework for Gore-Tex—the first product lines of Gore—and helped create and simulate the formation of that company. There’s Frank Martinez, who left DuPont as a glassblower, and who on his part-time, DuPont gave him the authority to build the first gas chromatograph, which is basically a gas separation and chemical separation device that's prevalent in almost every laboratory that’s out there in that sector. He started it from his DuPont heritage, and with that created the baseline for what we call today as Agilent Technologies. All that is how to get the tools in the hands of the entrepreneurs.

At Delaware Innovation Space, we’re supporting that science entrepreneur on their journey. Their journey is from concept of idea through exit. If you’re an entrepreneur, that exit then moves the product closer and closer to the market. During that journey, of course every phase of that journey requires funding—in terms of how they raise their funding, we help all entrepreneurs to point them in the right direction first hopefully they are non-diluted funding so they are SBIR grants, they are government contract grants, the way to structure an industrial partnership to progress you forward in a way that does not dilute your equity. We then, at right time, make those introductions to a variety of different angel groups around the country and around the region for opportunities for investment as well as VC connections. That’s where we use our bridges back to my heritage in DuPont and heritage of my staff, which one, Mike Patterson came himself out of—he was the CEO of a small company—to be able to teach those young entrepreneurs how to make those bridges and make those contacts and work with them on their pitches so it resonates once they do have that introduction and that relationship to land that next investment, depending on what phase they’re at in their journey, towards the exit.

Our financial partnership with DuPont, the University of Delaware, and the state was foundational. Without that, we couldn’t have created the Delaware Innovation Space. But now we’ve added additional partners one of those being the EDA. We applied for an innovation grant, a capital improvement grant with the US Department of Commerce and the Economic Development Agency within that. We were successful in terms of with that application, you get a $3 million cost share grant, meaning they bring forward $3 million, we bring $3 million from other partners, and right now we are in the design phase of a $6 million capital improvement project, so we’re going to take a great building, a great innovation space, but push it to the next level to really inspire people with just loving being there every day—not that they don’t already do, but they’re going to love it just a little bit more—and add additional capabilities. One of those structurally, what we need to do to convert what we got, which predominantly started off as a very great building but was more designed for a one company, larger company environment, to put different nuggets within the building structure, especially on the very early-stage companies—the ones I mentioned that maybe are just a couple of people—to give them a private home where they come in with just a very limited footprint and a low cost point. They can come in a very low cash burn rate perspective and be able to then propagate their ideas forward to then get the proof of concept for that next tranche of funding.

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ABOUT NEWMARK KNIGHT FRANK

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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