Pre-accelerator Program will Help Businesses Get Started, Stick Around
Penn State’s newest business pre-accelerator program, part of the Invent Penn State Initiative, was launched Thursday with a ribbon-cutting ceremony to mark the event.
Hosted by Penn State President Eric Barron at the former Verizon Building where a Happy Valley LaunchBox logo hung all month to tease the program’s opening, the ceremony drew cheers, applause, and emotion from local entrepreneurs and community leaders who want to help grow local businesses and keep them in harmonious operation with the community.
Read more: Happy Valley LaunchBox Holds Ribbon Cutting Ceremony
Centre County Commissioner Mark Higgins recently met with Dan Leri, Director of Innovation Park, and Nena Ellis Koschny, Assistant Director of Marketing & Communications for Invent Penn State, to discuss potential plans for collaboration and how the county can support Innovation Park’s and Invent Penn State’s efforts to drive economic development.
“There is a lot of support in the community now for entrepreneurship, startups, and economic development,” Centre County Commissioner Mark Higgins said. “Since my election two months and two weeks ago, the county has increased our economic development budget from $25,000 to $175,000 per year.”
You may be familiar with influenza, as you’ve likely suffered through it once or twice, but you may not know just how likely it is to get a false negative back from the swab test done at the doctor’s office. Therefore, early detection of a virus is crucial for the diagnosis and treatment of human infectious diseases.
Recent TechCelerator graduate—and winner of the $10,000 prize—Virolock Technologies may hold the key to a process that greatly improves the detection of viruses causing infectious diseases, like influenza, herpes, Zika Virus, Ebola, and hepatitis C, etc.
Read more: Recent TechCelerator Graduate Develops Technology to Improve Virus Detection
Successful Entrepreneur Tom Lancaster Visits Ben Franklin TechCelerator Teams
There’s nothing better than learning the ropes from someone who has first-hand experience—and that’s exactly the type of experiences that the Ben Franklin TechCelerator program is providing for budding entrepreneurs.
On Tuesday, March 22, interested individuals had one of many opportunities to learn from and connect with successful entrepreneurs.
Since the earliest patents for additive manufacturing devices have started to expire, the 3-D printing industry is entering a Wild West sort of stage, where innovators of new technologies will be championed and rewarded for bringing additive manufacturing to the next level.
Joe Sinclair and Innovation Park-based Solid Dynamics hope to be one of those companies at the forefront of this expansion.
The Penn State graduate has sat by different 3-D printers in his Innovation Park lab space for the last two years, watching as different liquid polymers are spun, squirted, molded, and assembled into whatever device his clients request. Taking entire design elements from his clients and tweaking or customizing them using his own engineering skills, Sinclair and his team first use computer-aided drafting software to mock up a blueprint. That blueprint is then introduced into one of 14 3-D printing machines Solid Dynamics uses.
Read more: Solid Dynamics Founder Taking 3-D Printers to School