By Fritz Klug
News Editor
The buildings along Campus Drive sit on land once owned by Western Michigan University.
They are not classrooms or lecture halls, but private businesses that specialize in life sciences, advanced engineering and information technology research and development. They sit scattered across 137 acres south of the 343,000 square feet College of Engineering and Applied Science at WMU’s Parkview campus.
The space is curvy and scenic. There is a large pond, areas of grass, and paved paths for people to walk and ride bicycles. Deer and other wildlife can be seen roaming across parts of the property. This is where Bob Gadwood decided to build offices for Kalexsyn Inc.
“It’s a very beautiful park,” Gadwood said. “It shows well to customers and is a pleasant place to be.”
Kalexsyn does lab work for pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
“There is no other place [in Kalamazoo] to put a wet chemistry lab,” said Gadwood, who is the president and chief scientific officer of Kalexsyn.
Kalexsyn is one of 31 companies that have moved into WMU’s Business Technology and Research Park since Richard Allan Scientific Inc. broke ground in 2001.
According to a 2008 study by Impact DataSource, the park has created 650 jobs, $25 million in salaries and $200 million in revenue a year every year.
Another 700 jobs are estimated to have been created in the community because of the park.
That’s about 4.7 jobs, $82,481 in salaries and $1,459,854 in revenue per acre. It is a trend Bob Miller, vice president of community outreach at WMU, hopes transfers to a possible expansion north to the 54-acre Colony Farm Orchard property, which the university also owns, as well as at some point, the WMU Soccer Complex on Parkview Avenue.
Three spots remain vacant in the current BTR Park.
The process of developing the Orchard property began over the summer when Rep. Robert Jones, D-Kalamazoo introduced legislation to rid the land of a restriction that says it should be used solely for the purpose for public park, recreation, or open space purposes, unless the legislature authorizes WMU to utilize for another public service.
A week before Jones introduced House Bill 5207, WMU’s Board of Trustees approved $985,000 to end a lease agreement with Michigan State University, who had been conducting entomological research on the property beginning in the early ‘60s.
So far, the deal with MSU has not been finalized, but the university is close to it, Lowell Rinker, vice president for business and finance, wrote in an e-mail Friday, Dec. 4.
“We have not yet identified the funding source for the dollars but it is anticipated that a combination of lot sales and unrestricted gift revenues will fund the cost,” Rinker said.
As the bill has not been voted on in the Michigan State Senate as of Dec. 8, the BTR park is on the eve of ending its first decade, a success to many of those involved with its conception and execution, as well as community members and organizations that have conferred numerous awards on it.
“This [economic development] is part of the university’s mission in addition to education,” Miller said.
WMU has sold land within the BTR Park for $80,000-$100,000 per acre and spent $6 million on the park’s infrastructure, Miller said.
The money that the university receives from property sales goes to pay off the original investment. Also, as part of the property’s SmartZone status, a portion of the taxes collected from the companies is used for the upkeep of the property.
Miller said that it will take an estimated $3 million for the expansion into the Orchard, which would also be repaid to the university by selling the parcels of land. He said the university hopes to expand the SmartZone footprint.
“It’s a misnomer [not true] that the university is making money off of the park,” Miller said.
While university land is being sold and leased to private companies, Miller said that WMU has the final say in what is built on the parcels of land. If a company decides to sell their lot, the university reserves the right to refuse a potential buyer, as part of the original sales agreement.
“It’s not like the university sells the property and walks away,” he said.
It is also part of the sales agreement that the company partners with WMU.
“They need to buy into the university’s mission,” Miller said, which many of the companies have done, as much as they been able.
Both Kalexsyn and Tekna, an advanced concept design and engineering firm, have had their employees teach as adjunct professors at WMU, but have had little interaction with employing students.
“One of the main drivers [of moving to the BTR Park] was to get associated with the university,” Wright said.
Tekna has had a graduate student intern with them, but since WMU’s industrial design program shut down and because of a lack of student interest, there has not been more involvement with students, said Andrew Wright, Tekna’s production business manager.
Gadwood said that Kalexsyn sometimes hires student employees to help clean lab equipment, and that he is happy to hire WMU students, but “it doesn’t seem that they want the jobs.”
On the other hand Proteos, a company that grows proteins for biotech companies, currently has two student interns as well as a part-time and full-time employee who are WMU students, making four out of their 17 employees WMU students, according to Clark Smith, president, CEO and co-founder.
Fred Sitkins, Ph.D, a professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering and director of Cooperative Education, said that these internships are crucial to engineering students. He said he often tells students that not having an internship is like studying piano theory without actually playing the piano.
The close proximity of the park to the college is important, Sitkins said. “The location means a lot because of transportation.”
While neither Miller nor Sitkins have no hard data on the number of students who have benefited from internships at BTR Park companies, he estimates that there has been around 12 per year. The number of students they hire depends on the economic position of company, he said.
There are other ways companies have worked with the university. Kalexsyn bought their lab equipment from WMU, which was donated to the university by Pfizer. They worked with Andre Venter, an assistant professor in the chemistry department, when they received a new high-resolution mass spectrometer, which Gadwood said they didn’t know how to use.
Venter said the collaboration with Kalexyn was a mutual benefit.
“Kalexyn could make better use of their investment in this particular piece of equipment, and researchers in the Chemistry Department gained access to a resource they did not have local access to before,” Vender wrote in an e-mail.
For Vender, it is important that faculty research gets outside of the university.
“Commercialization is one way to ensure that discoveries and inventions made by faculty find utility and have this broader impact,” Vender wrote. “Federal funding agencies also highly regard the Broader Impacts of research funded by them.”
Kalexsyn started off in Southwest Michigan First’s Innovation Center, which serves as a business incubator for start-up life science companies. Since its doors opened in 2003, 20 companies have “graduated” from its offices. It currently houses 12 companies.
For Rob DeWitt, the Innovation Center is helping to protect Michigan’s legacy of life sciences and be a tool to help Michigan become a “knowledge-based economy.”
Also housed in the Innovation center is the Biosciences Research & Commercialization Center, WMU’s venture capital organization for life science companies.
The BRCC was founded in 2003 after Pfizer closed its Drug Discovery and Clinical Development, cutting 1,200 jobs in the area. The Michigan State Legislature gave a $10 million grant to create the BRCC, to which WMU was required to match $2.5 million. It is from this money that the BRCC invests in startup companies and funds its operations.
While the BRCC is affiliated with the university and many WMU administrators including Lowell Rinker, Carol Hustoles, vice president for Legal Affairs, and Jan Van Der Kley, associate vice president for business and finance, it does not tap into University funds.
Jack Luderer, Ph.D., director of the BRCC, said that the companies they invest in are beneficial to the future of the university.
“The universities today need to participate in economic development,” Luderer said.
“When you go to Lansing to talk to the legislatures who fund us…I’ve never had questions about curriculum or some of those issues. They want to know what are you doing to help improve the economic situation here. What are you doing with your graduates, your teaching programs, with other issues of taking the investment made in the state [to] the universities and research and how are you translating that and getting it out in the market place that actually does something.
“Even though we don’t appear to fall into the classic bucket of what a university should be doing, we’re not primarily involved in teaching, every major research university has to have and does have a component that has to deal with economic development and translation of translation of research into marketplace,” Lauderer continued.
The BRCC has formally invested in 23 companies, eight of which are housed in the BTR Park. Once they give the company money, they keep track of the company’s progress and meet regularly to assess the progress.
While any expansion would be at least three years off, and there are currently no design plans, the planning needs to begin now, Miller said.
“If and when it happens, the university will pay its part,” he said. The university’s business partners and Oshtemo Township will have an opportunity to financially contribute,” he said.
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