Montgomery Campus Innovation Center to Open

According to the Washington Post Montgomery County Extra today:

The Germantown Innovation Center, on the upper county campus of Montgomery College, is to take in its first tenants in the coming weeks, with a grand opening for the 32,000-square-foot business incubator set for Oct. 20

The $6.65 million county project, funded with state assistance, is intended to host 25 to 35 start-up companies, with county economic development officials providing business and technical support. About one-third of the companies should be biotechnology based, and half should be technology firms.

Also planned are an $85 million Bioscience Education Center, with classrooms and state-of-the-art laboratories for students, and a 40-acre Science and Technology Business Park, intended to create a hub of biotech businesses in a place where students can learn from them.....

The county approached the college about the business park in 2001. A previous county-sponsored project, the Shady Grove Life Science Park, was thriving, and officials said they thought Montgomery would benefit from another bioscience and technology park.

The business park is expected ultimately to create nearly 4,000 full-time jobs.

About 100 students a year go through the Montgomery College biotechnology program, and enrollment is expected to more than triple as the program expands to meet the growing demand for biotech expertise in our workforce.

The Germantown campus also has partnered with the University of Maryland at College Park, which has agreed to relocate its Montgomery-based biosciences degree program from the Universities at Shady Grove to the proposed education center in Germantown. Students who completed an associate's degree in biotechnology at Germantown would be able to complete a University of Maryland at College Park bachelor's degree on the Germantown campus......

The college is working with five Montgomery high schools to develop biotech academies, and with the help of a $600,000 National Science Foundation grant, it is also working with middle school teachers to promote bioscience education and careers.

Comment: This is so good an approach that it should serve as a model for other regions and other countries. It ties education from junior high school, high school, two-year college, and university to serve the complete manpower needs of an evolving and expanding high technology industry.

In the case of Montgomery County, bioscience industries are already well under way, and there are nearby government research centers such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

There is an active industrial development office of local government, and hundreds of Post Docs working in the local area. Indeed, the county runs an annual program to encourage these scientists to stay and work locally when their training ends. There are already a number of technology incubators.

Congratulations to all involved! JAD