One of my favorite things about Tech Tour is getting to venture north of the Mackinac Bridge to the Upper Peninsula.
Especially since its population of roughly 320,000 is so enterprising and tech-savvy.
Once again a visit to the Keweenaw country and Michigan Technological University proved both fun and fascinating, starting with a dinner Friday night with MTU officials and my traveling partners -- Diane Durance, executive director of the Great Lakes Entrepreneurs Quest, and Danielle DeLonge, network manager of ConnecTech, Automation Alley's association for technology professionals.
At the dinner, I learned that Michigan Tech's Keweenaw Research Center is finally moving out of its "temporary" quarters -- 1950s Quonset huts at the regional airport -- and is building a proper 20,000 square foot headquarters. The KRC conducts a wide variety of scientific resaerch for the military, industry and research institutions.
I also got a close look -- since the restaurant at Houghton's downtown Best Western overlooks it -- at the 51,000-square-foot former Upper Peninsula Power Co. building that will become the MTU SmartZone's fourth business incubator. SmartZone CEO Carlton Crothers told me he's already getting nibbles from three Fortune 100 companies who want to start research centers in Houghton and who would be a natural for the new incubator. They'd join the likes of Ford Motor Co. and General Electric Corp. which have software development and research centers in the Houghton area, putting MTU grads to work and giving them the chance to stay up in God's Country after graduation.
My Saturday morning started at the crack of dawn at MTU's new Alternative Energy Research Building in Hancock, with mechanical engineering researcher Jeremy Worm.
Michigan Tech has owned this 14,000-square-foot building for decades, using it as a groundwater geology lab and most recently as storage. Now, since several faculty members have received grants in renewable energy, the building is being remodeled to contain a variety of high-tech labs and experimental gear for research into alternatives to petroleum.
Included will be a wind tunnel, fuel cell research equipment, an environment chamber where the temperature and humidity can be controlled from 40 below to 120 above, and a completely cool combustion chamber -- essenially a one-cylinder engine machined out of a single 1,600-pound block of stainless steel. The chamber has holes that can be filled by huge solid sapphire windows, so researchers can see what's happening inside the chamber as fuel and air ignite. Lasers and high-speed photography will provide insight into the combustion process.
From Hancock it was a short jaunt to the south side of Houghton to GS Engineering, which president Glen Simula started in 2001, when he was a researcher at KRC. He left MTU to devote full-time to the business in 2002. Since then, he's found huge success in design, analysis and testing of lightweight components for vehicles, mostly for the military. The company's first contract was the study of lightweight wheels for a new Marine Corps amphibious troop transport that will speed through the water at 35 knots -- then come ashore on tracks ready to fight.
The company has also researched replacing heavy iron and steel components with lighter aluminum and ceramic composite materials for the Army in a wide variety of vehicles.
GS moved from temporary quarters into its own brand-new 14,000-square-foot building in March. The company has grown to 52 employees, including six hired in the past month alone. (Eleven of those employees are working at the U.S. Army's TACOM military vehicle research center in Warren.)
"It's worked out better than we expected," Simula said. "Our business plan was five people after two years."
Simula said the company gets most of its employees from Michigan Tech -- for recent college grades, he said, "we bring 'em in junior year and keep the best ones," while for more senior staff, he contacts Michigan Tech alumns 10-15 years into their careers who want to move back north and raise families. He's also hired Jim Bottomley, a retired Air Force colonel and Highes Aircraft executive, to become the company's first COO. He said a good deal of the company's growth hascome from the contacts of the people he's hired.
The self-effacing Simula wrapped up by saying: "We have a saying here -- everybody we hire has to be smarter than the last one we hired so we can keep growing. Well, guess what, I was employee No. 1."
My next stop was the Minerals and Materials Building for a look at the research of professor Seth Donahue into the role bear hormones may play in curing osteoporosis. No, seriously.
Ph.D. student Meghan McGee-Lawrence took me through Donahue's labs. She said researchers got interested in the hormones because bears hibernate for months without losing bone mass. People who stop moving in anything approaching that fashion immediately start losing bone, often with disastrous results. The research focused on parathyroid hormone because the thyroid regulates the level of calcium in the body.
Michigan Tech filed for a patent on the concept, and began developing it with the Kalamazoo venture firm Apjohn Group, which has taken an option to license the technology and worked with Michigan Tech to secure funding from the Michigan Universities Commercialization Initiative for cell-based and early animal studies.
Those studies have produced promising results, and Apjohn has formed a company, Aursos Inc., to raise funding to develop the technology further. Seed funders included the UP Business Capital arm of Northern Initiatives, an economic development agency.
After that, I sat in on an informational meeting of ConnecTech. There's considerable interest in starting a UP chapter -- it may combine the tech strengths of the UP's universities and community colleges, along with its considerable technology entrepreneurial culture.
The formal part of my Hougton visit ended with Dave Reed, Michigan Tech vice president for research, about the university's $20 million Energy Center of Excellence project.
Michigan Tech will partner with Michigan State University and Mascoma Corp., as well as the MEDC and J.M. Longyear -- a Marquette company that owns more than 65,000 acres of forest land in the Upper Peninsula -- to develop the state’s first commercial cellulosic ethanol plant. The plant will be located in Chippewa County, south of Sault Ste. Marie.
Essentially, Reed said, the project will begin with a giant supply chain study to determine the best ways to get wood waste to the gate of a cellulosic ethanol plant, so that what now is regarded as unwanted waste can be sent most efficiently for processing. "It's a transportation optimization problem," he said. It will study the best ways to use trucks and rail to get the waste to the plant gate.
Reed said work on the actual processing center will begin in 2009, with full production of 20 million gallons of ethanol a year scheduled for 2012.
Saturday afternoon, heaven forbid, I actually had a little bit of fun. I went to Michigan Tech's football game (cute little stadium, great crowd I'd estimate at 5,000, and they beat Ferris State). After that, I took ConnecTech's DeLonge on her first trip out to the end of the Keweenaw, all the way to Copper Harbor and up Brockway Mountain Drive for some spectacular fall scenery. (Believe it or not the colors haven't peaked yet, though -- you can still go up this weekend or even next and catch 'em.)
Sunday, I made the seven-and-a-half-hour drive from Houghton to Mount Pleasant. As you read this, I'll be visiting the cool technology under development at Central Michigan University.
The tech tour continues at Ferris State University Tuesday, Western Michigan University Wednesday, MSU Thursday and the University of Michigan Friday.
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