LITTLE ROCK — Virtual Incubation Co, a for-profit technology incubator in Fayetteville, said this week that it’s starting a sister business near Boston.
The new Atlantic Virtual Incubation Co. holds potential to attract new investment opportunities and to acquire complementary sources of intellectual property. Virtual Incubation Co. was founded by Calvin Goforth in 2000 and specializes in the development of early-stage technology businesses.
“There’s a potentially significant impact” for Arkansas incubator businesses, since the Boston region has an established infrastructure for technology commercialization, said Goforth, chairman of the new Waltham, Mass.-based business, in a telephone interview.
“By having a sister company in that area, we can make connections to provide potential partners opportunities, and investment opportunities, to develop what we’re doing in Arkansas.”
Virtual Incubation has 12 businesses in its portfolio, nine of which have at least some intellectual property licensed from the University of Arkansas.
Incubators typically further academic research into commercialized products and services through the use of grants issued through the Small Business Innovation Research program. About 75 percent of the funding comes from government agencies, with the remainder from private sources.
Goforth’s incubator provides administrative and product development support through a financial arrangement in which it becomes an equity partner in the business.
And some of the portfolio businesses managed by Virtual Incubation are at the Arkansas Research and Technology Park, a collection of testing facilities and office space.
Massachusetts is home to dozens of incubators, some of which are represented by the Massachusetts Association of Business Incubators, which focuses mainly on the kinds of incubators offering a physical location with rentable office space.
“We could always get to the point where there are too many [business incubators], but I don’t think we’re there,” said Eric Anderson, founder of the association representing 16 member incubators and affiliated startup business programs.
Incubation programs vary among the 1,400 incubators in North America, according to the National Business Incubator Association. And unlike incubators offering discounted real estate space, a virtual incubator such as Virtual Incubation delivers its services through an electronic medium.
In the Boston region, universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tufts University will be some of the intellectual property sources that Atlantic Virtual Incubation Co. will license and develop, said Bernie Prusaczyk, president and chief executive officer of Atlantic Virtual Incubation.
The new incubator has about $1 million to fund licensing contracts that will help “birth” two Atlantic Virtual Incubation portfolio companies by the end of the year. Another three portfolio companies are planned for 2012, he said.
“The [portfolio] businesses will be in the broad spheres of science and engineering, closely akin to health care,”Prusaczyk said Wednesday in a telephone interview.
Prusaczyk’s startup background reaches across several industries including medical devices, life sciences data management and printing technologies.
He’s credited with growing revenue of less than $2 million to more than $30 million during a five-year tenure as the head of sales and marketing at Typographic Systems. The company is now called Monotype Imaging and was a former division of printing technology business Agfa, according to the incubator’s website. Universities can provide physical space for researchers, but they don’t have a good conduit to help them get a company outside their walls, Prusaczyk said.
“Universities lack a go-to partner, and a founding team, to get to the next level,” he said.
Business, Pages 27 on 10/06/2011