There's innovation and tech-based economic development all over Michigan -- including right smack dab in the middle of the Lower Peninsula.
I learned that Monday during Day Six of the Great Lakes IT Report 2008 Spring Tech Tour in Mount Plesant.
The day started with a presentation on innovation from Keith Brophy, of the Grand Rapids tech company variously known through the years as Sagestone, NuSoft and RCM. He was speaking at Central Michigan University's beautiful new Park Library to an audience of about a dozen people interested in forming a central Michigan ConnecTech chapter.
Brophy holds that while great innovation seems to burst forth, it's frequently the product of steady incremental advances.
Take the iPod -- Brophy said such devices had been around for 10 years, so there was nothing revolutionary about Apple's wildly successful music player. What was different was how it was packaged and its user interface.
Likewise the transistor, developed as an electronic light switch to maintain an on or off state to improve phone service. Only later would it lead to integrated circuits, Silicon Valley and the tech revolution.
Brophy also predicted technology leading to increased public surveillance, nanobot medicine in our bloodstreams, and useful robots. (However, he said research has shown that robots that look just like humans "freak us out," so the best robot designs are kind of a combination of R2D2 and Barney the Dinosaur.)
Brophy even predicted billboards that shine an infrared light in the direction of passersby -- harmlessly proving just how many people looked at the billboard.
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My first company interview of the day was Jerry Morey, preisdent of Bandit Industries Inc. in Remus, just west of Mt. Pleasant. Bandit manufactures a wide range of commercial wood chippers, including large whole-tree chippers and waste reduction machines.
So what the heck is high-tech about chippers? More than you'd think. For one thing, of course, they're all designed on CAD-CAM-CAE three dimensional software. And the machines now all feature computer controls, including remote automatic operation, in which sensors determine the load on a machine, and if it's too high, automatically stops it and backs out material and restarts, without the operator having to do a thing.
More importantly, the 310-employee company is getting more and more involved in producing the raw material for renewable energy generation.
"There's a considerable number of wood fired power plants that have been built throughout the country, and CMU gets half of its heat and air conditioning load from wood," Morey said.
Bandit chippers can also produce the raw materials for cellulosic ethanol production, he said, reducing the pressure on food crops like corn to make ethanol.
Morey said Bandit's sales are $95 million and sells all over the world.
Morey also said the company's Web site is a big part of its business, and is the biggest form of communication with its dealers. The company's computer consultant is Trivalent of Grand Rapids.
Morey said he sees only growth for wood-related businesses.
"The benefits of trees are well known, so the states and municipalities and federal government incorporate tree growth into design of facilities and parks, and trees always need to be pruned, and trees die and need to be removed, and probably a big untapped resource that I think will come into play here and around the world is the amount of forest product waste that exists from logging operations," Morey said. "Eventually we will use limbs and tops I think primarily for fuel. It's a low cost fuel that also elminates fire risk and habitat for disease."
More at www.banditchippers.com.
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My next visitor in the Park Library was Ryan L. Wheeler, corporate sales manager at Alma-based TMS Technologies Inc.
TMS was founded last Oct. 1 through the spinout of the technology department of Traffic Management Services, a third party logistics company founded in 1982 that was sold by founder Dave Brookhouse to the trucking firm CR England Co.
Today, TMS offers small and mid-sized businesses a wide variety of tech services. Included are the Envision suite that offers automated freight bill auditing, freight carrier check writing, freight mode reporting and more; UnLock, which audits shipping bills for overcharges; and OptiShip, which uses sophisticated algorithms to derive optimal mode selection for each individual package.
The company also offers basic tech stuff like data backup, Web site hosting and Web development.
The company's services are offered on the software-as-a-service model.
"It's all centered around our motto of 'relentless innovation' and allowing businesses to do what they do best and not having to worry about all the perhipherals," Wheeler said.
More at www.tmstechnologies.com.
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Next up was William Henderson III, president of Ithaca-based Aircraft Precision Products Inc.
Aircraft Precision Products is the traditional family company, started by Henderson's grandfather in 1946. Henderson, a 1981 Michigan State University graduate in mechanical engineering, took over as president in 2000.
The company is actually the product of a spinoff of a Ferndale company, N.A. Woodworth Corp. that makes a variety of industrial products, The company began producing aircraft products during World War II, and was spun off shortly thereafter. It moved to Ithaca in 1972, and today is owned by its employees under an Employee Stock Ownership Plan.
Today, the 65-employee company makes precision jet aircraft parts -- precision turning circles between four and 50 inches. Its biggest customer is GE Aviation, followed by Rolls Royce. It also does business directly with the United States military and does business overseas with aircraf suppliers ITP in Spain, MTU in Germany and Snecma in France.
Henderson said the company is growing and picking up customers. It's also getting ready to break ground on a building additon -- 22,500 square feet of mostly manufacturing space, to be added to its existing 26,000-square-foot building. The company is also hiring machine operators and recently hired a former Kettering University co-op student as an engineer.
Said Henderson: "What is unique about us really is our work force. Being here in the heartland, over half of our employees have 20 years or more with us, and we have a lot of 30-year employees. They are very dedicated and they know the parts. Anybody can go out and spend a lot of money and buy a lot of high-tech equipment, but I think it's knowing how to use it that makes the difference in the end."
More at www.aircraftprecision.net.
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Next I spoke with Ryan Richards, marketing manager for Midland Tomorrow, the name since 2004 of what had been the Midland Economic Development Council.
Midland is just 26 miles east of Mt. Pleasant, and while the city has long been tied as part of "tri-cities" with Saginaw and Bay City, these days it's also looking west to the educational and research opportunities offered by CMU in Mt. Pleasant.
Richards said Midland is also looking to draw more companies in its strong suit economically, chemicals and advanced materials -- with Dow Chemical Co. having 5,000 jobs in Midland County and Dow Corning Corp. another 1,500, out of a total county work force of 42,000.
"Chemicals, advanced materials, that's what we do really well, so we're looking to reach out and target companies that are in that specialty chemical manufacturing cluster," Richards said. "We have a lot of expertise."
More at www.midlandtomorrow.com.
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I also spoke to Chris Moultrup, marketing and facilities manager at the Mid-Michigan Innovation Center, a former Dow Chemical building on the Midland-Saginaw county line that is now a 112,000-square-foot business incubator.
New tenants include Bravo Smart Web Design, a Web 2.0 technologies comapny (www.bravosmart.com) and an office of the Central Michigan University Research Corp.
Moultrup said the center is now at about 80 percent occupancy, and is likely to graduate its first tenant out of the incubator and into its own space this summer. That will free up another 2,000 to 3,000 square feet in the building.
The MMIC is funded by five area foundations. More at http://www.midmichiganinnovationcenter.org/.
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And I spoke about innovation and economic development at a whole lot more over lunch with Roger Rehm, vice president for IT and CIO of CMU, Kathy Backus, publisher and editor of Vision Mid Michigan, a business news Web site covering the New Economy in mid-Michigan, and Ken Van Der Wende, a former Dow Chemical executive who's just been named the new president and CEO of the CMU Research Corp.
And I leave Mt. Pleasant more convinced than ever that the mid-Michigan region is making strong strides toward a knowledge-based economy.
Tuesday's Tech Tour stop will be in Lansing, an area where the tech economy is positively booming. I'm meeting with nine or 10 companies today -- wish me luck in keeping everything accurate!
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