Nebraska Innovation Campus has created a talent pipeline from the university to innovative companies, helping convert the state’s brain drain to brain gain.
By Tiffany Lee (’07, ’10)
Photos by Craig Chandler
When the University of Nebraska-Lincoln acquired the historic state fairgrounds in Lincoln in 2010, leaders envisioned a thriving research campus with private companies working side-by-side with Husker scientists and students. Through this innovation hub, university leaders and state lawmakers aimed to attract companies to the state, fuel job growth, retain young talent and bolster campus research.
Fast forward eight years, and the dream is reality. Nebraska Innovation Campus is home to more than 30 private and public sector partners. Its 380,000 square feet is already 100 percent leased, and at full build-out, NIC is expected to occupy 2.2 million square feet and employ up to 5,000 people.
Things are going so well, in fact, that the Association of University Research Parks recognized NIC’s fast start with the 2017 Emerging Research Park Award, which recognizes research parks less than 10 years old that excel in commercializing laboratory research, attracting business partners, spinning off new businesses and sparking job growth.
One of NIC’s greatest contributions is helping Nebraska conquer a longstanding problem: the flight of well-educated, highly skilled college graduates who take with them the potential for tax dollars that would expand the state’s economy. Census data captured this phenomenon in 2016, showing that between 2011 and 2015, 2,300 more highly educated people moved out than moved into the state.
By creating a talent pipeline from the university to innovative companies, NIC helps convert brain drain to brain gain.
“Globally, there is a huge scramble for talent,” said Dan Duncan, NIC’s executive director. “By creating an environment at NIC that is attractive to young talent, especially students coming out of the university, the campus provides a culture where companies are able to compete with other areas of the world for the employees that fuel their growth.”
Take Alex Heine, for example. When he moved to Lincoln for college in 2012, he figured he’d spend four years in his new home, study for his degree in animal science, then take his diploma back to his hometown of Yankton, South Dakota, and get to work at the family feedlot.
Those plans changed when Heine, as a UNL student, took an internship at Quantified Ag. The NIC-based startup develops patent-pending smart technology for cattle ear tags that gives producers real-time information about livestock health.
Not only did Heine love the job — a perfect blend of his dual passions, technology and feedlot operations — it also gave him an inside view of Lincoln’s emerging business culture, enhanced by NIC’s top-notch facilities, collaborative environment and location adjacent to campus.
“I did not think Lincoln would be at this caliber,” Heine said. “There’s been so much growth in the young professional sector, and at NIC, you’re always around peers who are also building businesses. There’s no shortage here of mentorship or access to resources.”
In addition to Heine, there is one more intern-turned-employee at Quantified Ag, and three Nebraska undergraduates currently interning at the 12-member company. Founder Vishal Singh, a 1997 alum and a former university employee, said the company is refining and expanding the reach of its patent-pending technology, which gathers behavioral and biometric data from cattle, including body temperature, that helps producers detect ill animals and curb disease before it spreads — a “Fitbit for cows” of sorts.
“There’s been so much growth in the young professional sector, and at NIC, you’re always around peers who are also building businesses. There’s no shortage here of mentorship or access to resources.”
The company is even building international ties in other places with large feedlot populations like Australia and Brazil, where tighter production regulations boost demand for Quantified Ag’s services. Locating at NIC helps the startup launch those partnerships, Singh said.
“Moving from the Haymarket to NIC in 2015 put us among other like-minded people focused on agriculture and food technology,” he said. “As we’ve grown, we get more interest from potential collaborators, and several of them have said they like the fact that we’re on a research campus.”
Bolero Information Systems, the university’s first staff spinoff at NIC, also got its start in developing tech tools for researchers.
Tim Savage, Bolero’s managing director and head of operations, said the web application and design company chose its home base partly to help cultivate relationships.
“It was a strategic decision, as we wanted to show prospective clients that we are located in a research park with close ties to a major research institution,” Savage said. “We aren’t just a team of developers working out of someone’s garage.”
Bolero is a five-person team that includes four University of Nebraska alums, one of whom is a former intern. Its signature product, OneRamp, is an electronic research administrative portal designed to ease research administration and automate business processes. Savage and colleagues designed the system while they were university employees, and its popularity grew via word of mouth.
They licensed the technology with NUtech Ventures, Nebraska’s technology commercialization arm, and officially became a university spinoff in 2016. Bolero’s clientele includes the Lincoln, Omaha and Kearney campuses of the University of Nebraska, Tulane University and companies in London and Chicago.
NIC also serves as a talent magnet, drawing out-of-state entrepreneurs to Cornhusker territory. This was the case for Tyler Martin, CEO of Adjuvance Technologies, a privately held biopharmaceutical company focused on vaccine design and manufacturing.
Martin, a Hebron, Nebraska, native with degrees from the University of Nebraska at Kearney and the University of Nebraska Medical Center, returned to Lincoln in 2013 after a successful career in Silicon Valley, where he played a key role in launching startups and managing established biotech companies. Back home, Martin needed what’s known as wet laboratory space — a facility enabling the safe study of chemicals, drugs and biological materials — to advance Adjuvance’s goal of creating molecules that improve patients’ responses to vaccines. Building a wet lab and acquiring the essential specialized equipment is cost-prohibitive for most startups.
Martin found the perfect solution in NIC’s Biotech Connector, which launched last year offering wet lab space and equipment to small and startup companies to lift Nebraska’s biotechnology sector and create jobs. The facility — a partnership between NIC, the university, Bio Nebraska, Invest Nebraska and the Nebraska Department of Economic Development — also offers young companies access to expertise and networking.
“The availability of wet lab space is what drove my decision to bring Adjuvance to NIC,” Martin said. “When you need a specialized laboratory, there are not many options.”
Perhaps no NIC-based company has tapped into the university’s resources as effectively as Spreetail, an e-commerce company that sells everything from housewares to baby gear to electronics. CEO Brett Thome, a Nebraska Wesleyan University graduate, said approximately 80 percent of his 180 full-time employees are Husker graduates. In this year’s intern class of 55 — the company’s largest ever — about 50 percent are Nebraska undergraduates. Each year, roughly 50 percent of Spreetail interns join the company following graduation and stay in the Silicon Prairie.
“By coming to NIC, we really increased our access and visibility with the university and our ability to build out recruiting pipelines,” said Thome, who hopes to add another 400 employees over the next three years. Most will work in business development, software engineering, sales, customer experience and human resources.
Last year, Spreetail’s revenue hit a high-water mark of $250 million, a key target toward its goal of $1 billion. To accommodate rapid growth, the group is doubling its square footage within NIC this year and opening office space for about 100 new team members in Omaha’s Aksarben Village, another growing and thriving community.
To attract young professionals, Spreetail offers perks ubiquitous at coastal startups: unlimited vacation, destination trips, sabbaticals for five-year employees and company matches to employees’ charitable donations, to name a few.
“I know that for some of our employees, Spreetail is what kept them in the state,” Thome said. “We, along with some other great companies, have turned Lincoln into a great place to be.”