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NorTech CEO Looks to Electronics, Energy Sectors
CLEVELAND -- When Rebecca Bagley became president and CEO of NorTech five years ago, she saw her role as ensuring that northeastern Ohio didn’t miss out in the next technology economy.
“When I was coming in to interview, I got picked up by a driver,” she remembers. “And he was telling me how down and out he was and how this was such a bad place to live.”
That was 2009.
As a candidate to lead NorTech, a nonprofit formed 15 years ago to articulate a regional vision, she empathized with the driver.
Like a general visiting the front lines, Bagley assessed the situation, counted the wounded and came up with a plan. Her goal? To diversify the economy.
Formed by the business community 15 years ago and headquartered in downtown Cleveland, NorTech has been integral to the creation of entities such as JumpStart, an Ohio Third Frontier project, and the Ohio Venture Capital Authority.
It was now up to Bagley to determine how best to direct NorTech.
“How do we accelerate the pace of innovation in our region to make sure that we have a more diverse economy?” was the question before her.
Two areas of the market jumped out: flexible electronics and advanced energy.
Vadxx Energy is one of NorTech’s success stories. The company was started when geochemist Bill Ullom stumbled upon an expired patent for a chemical process to turn petroleum-based waste into oil.
“Over time we started to realize that Vadxx had some challenges with the cost of getting to market,” says Bagley. The company also needed help with the scale up of its plant.
NorTech introduced Vadxx to Rockwell Automation, the world’s largest company dedicated solely to automation, which has a plant in nearby Twinsburg.
As a result of the partnership, Vadxx secured funding from a private equity firm to build its first full-scale plant in Akron. Rockwell was awarded a $15 million contract to engineer and build the plant.
The plant is scheduled to go online next spring and convert about 20,000 tons of plastics into 100,000 barrels of petroleum annually.
“So it’s a nice story of Vadxx growing jobs in the region, Rockwell growing their sales and revenue and potentially their jobs within the region,”Bagley says. “And we worked as an intermediary to make some of those connections.”
Dr. Fred Lisy, the president of Orbital Research in Cleveland, calls himself “a natural salesman.” His company, founded in 1991, specializes in fast-acting, flexible and cost-efficient advanced-control systems. Its products are in demand by the military for their ability to monitor heart rate, body temperature and other indicators of human health.
“We build sensors, actuators and electronics,” Lisy says. For 10 years he’s been relying on NorTech for a host of services, including market research. He remembers the advice NorTech staff gave him to use on his next sales call.
“You may just want to go there and listen and learn what their true needs are,” he recalls. Lisy listened and as a result gained considerable insight into the marketplace, insight that allowed his company to pivot its technology to different areas of the market as the times and demands change.
Lisy says NorTech brought with it a strong network of strategic partners. “They provide companies with a sounding board to make sure you’re not crazy,” he says.
The impact of NorTech is hard to quantify, Lisy says, but the experience has been overwhelmingly positive. “You want to deal with the groups that provide you the best value and I find good value with NorTech,” he says.
These two examples are but a small sample of the work NorTech has done in the region.
Bagley has data that provide a sharper focus. “Over the last four years, companies that we’ve worked with have created 925 jobs and attracted $143 million in capital,” she says, citing numbers obtained from a survey of companies.
NorTech is actively involved in 21 counties in northeastern Ohio and at any given time working on some 50 projects. The NorTech chief reviews the changes she witnessed during her tenure.
“When I arrived five years ago, calling it ‘Tech Belt,’ not ‘Rust Belt.’ was extremely aspirational. It was a vision.”
But Bagley says the pace of innovation, in addition to projects such as America Makes in Youngstown and the Tech Belt Energy Innovation Center in Warren, reinforce her belief that NorTech’s strategy is working.
NorTech cannot “touch everything,” Bagley allows, and has benefited from being in a region ready to grasp change. When she arrived, she recalls being happy to find “the community leaders had a vision that was fairly closely aligned with each other,” and a willingness to cooperate.
Another reason so many companies are working across regional boundaries, she says, is because NorTech puts its focus on global market opportunities.
She also credits the academic community with initiating much of the cooperation within the region.
In the past five years NorTech has gone from four employees to 16 and become an organization built on accelerating the pace of innovation. The changes the organization has experienced have been necessary, Bagley says, but it remains the same.
Pictured: Rebecca Bagley became president and CEO of NorTech in 2009. The nonprofit was formed 15 years ago.
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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