Creating an Ecosystem

Steven Boyd isn’t just the president and board chairman of the Berkshire Innovation Center; he’s a true believer that the $13.8 million facility will be a game changer for the region’s manufacturing and life-sciences economy.

“From a broad perspective, I’d say the center aims to support the legacy manufacturing base that has a long history of innovation here in the Berkshire region,” he told BusinessWest. “We’re an innovation center that is equal parts research and teaching institution and programming for private-sector businesses.”

State and local officials gathered last Tuesday at the William Stanley Business Park of the Berkshires in Pittsfield to break ground on a project that has been in the planning and fundraising stages for a decade, and is expected to open by the third quarter of 2019.

The two-story, 20,000-square-foot workforce-development center will include training facilities, lab space, clean rooms, and office and event space for small- to medium-sized companies, just to name a few amenities, with the collective goal of boosting economic growth, employment, and private investment in the region.

“The center aims to support and accelerate growth and innovation by providing access to state-of-the-art equipment like 3D printers and a microscopy suite, as well as conferencing and teaching facilities,” Boyd said, adding that the center will also be the centerpiece of the mostly underdeveloped, 52-acre business park it calls home.

“The building will have all these types of spaces combined into a very cooperative, shared maker-space type of environment,” he went on, with one goal being to bring ideas and inventions from colleges and research institutions, even those from the eastern part of the state, together with local manufacturing knowhow and the resources needed for commercialization.

“One of the things that makes Cambridge so vibrant is all the new technology that’s being researched or commercialized as a result of all the ideation happening at places like MIT,” Boyd said. “So, as part of stimulating the economy in the Berkshires, we want to promote more of that ideation and commercialization here.”

Gov. Charlie Baker said as much at last week’s groundbreaking. “Our administration is focused on boosting the Commonwealth’s thriving life-sciences sector in every corner of the state,” he noted. “Investing in the Berkshire Innovation Center will help expand the capacity and capabilities of this region’s entrepreneurial community to drive job creation, retention, and outside investment in Western Massachusetts.”

Boyd, who is also CEO of Boyd Technologies in Lee, said the Baker administration has been focused on creating a network of innovation in manufacturing and the life sciences that encompasses the entire state, and the Berkshire Innovation Center (BIC) will be a key part of it.

“They recognize all the momentum going on in Boston and see the opportunity to provide efficiencies by creating a statewide ecosystem,” he noted. “In the Berkshires, we have available space and facilities at lower cost to provide that type of efficiency. It can be invented at MIT and commercialized in the Berkshires, and you don’t have to get on a plane and fly halfway around the world to make something that’s truly innovative.”

Nearly 5,000 jobs in Berkshire Country are in the manufacturing sector, making it the fifth-largest industry in the region.

With that in mind, Housing and Economic Development Secretary Jay Ash noted that the center will serve as an anchor institution for region, “strengthening connections between the life sciences and advanced-manufacturing industries and education institutions, creating jobs, and shaping the next generation of home-grown innovators.”

Precision Endeavor

At the start of the summer, the BIC board brought on Consigli Construction Co., one of the largest general contractors in the Northeast, to oversee construction at the former General Electric site. John Benzinger, a senior project manager for Skanska USA Building Inc. of Springfield, will serve as the owner’s project manager. Skanska recently served as the project manager for Union Station in Springfield.

Resources inside in the innovation center, when it is completed, will include:

• Precision measurement and reverse engineering utilizing the BIC’s flagship platform, the Hexagon Metrology 121510 CMM with touch probe, laser scanner, camera module, and ROMER Arm;

• A rapid prototyping center featuring cutting-edge 3D printing capabilities in plastics and metals;

• Precision analysis and microscopy with the Zeiss Axio Imager 2 platform, for both life-sciences and materials research;

• Clean-room lab space to conduct research or pilot production for nanotechnology, life sciences, or other applications requiring a clean environment; and

• Wet-lab space to conduct collaborative life-sciences research or start up a biotechnology company. The lab will feature sinks, DI water, fume hoods, biosafety cabinets, autoclave, centrifuge, incubators, deep freezer, glass washer, ice machine, and lab supplies.

The center will also offer customized training programs for advanced manufacturing, access to Berkshire Community College’s engineering technology classes, and the space for companies to conduct their own proprietary training in technology-loaded classrooms.

In addition, BIC members will be able to collaborate on research with UMass Amherst, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, UMass Lowell, and SUNY Colleges of Nanoscale Science & Engineering, as well as develop training and internship programs with Berkshire Community College (BCC), McCann Technical School, and Taconic High School.

This broad coalition of academic partnerships sets BIC apart from other facilities, like the Institute for Applied Life Sciences at UMass Amherst, that provide cutting-edge resources for manufacturers and commercialization opportunities for innovators, Boyd said.

“When we started thinking about the business plan, we felt this area is underserved in terms of business-class conferencing and teaching areas,” he told BusinessWest. “Of course, BCC has wonderful classrooms and teaching facilities, and many companies around here have their own conference rooms, but not a place to host larger-scale strategic meeting or annual board retreats. I think it would be nice to have a local facility that allows third-party distance learning and access to state-of-the-art conferencing that is otherwise not available here.”

Steven Boyd

“We’re an innovation center that is equal parts research and teaching institution and programming for private-sector businesses.”

In fact, it’s the workforce-development aspects of the facility that have Boyd as excited as the cutting-edge technology.

“Specifically, we envision training that is very germane to industry, and at the same time we want to provide a provide a place for our fundamentals to be available for incumbent workers,” he said. “BCC will play a very central role in training — in manufacturing fundamentals, LEAN manufacturing concepts, STEM-related programs — but we also will bring in subject-matter experts to talk about things like sensors and actuators that relate to automation systems and things that provide deeper lifelong learning for the workplace out here — and, of course provide a steady stream of talent.”

Next Generation

That last aspect is key, he added — the idea that partnering with area high schools and colleges on training and internship programs will boost the pipeline of young talent into fields like biotechnology and precision manufacturing that desperately need it.

“It’s self-serving for businesses in that way,” Boyd said. “We’re preparing kids in schools today for careers that may start with a local company but end with a long career in biotech. Our point is, if you are qualified in this space and engage in a growth mindset and lifelong learning, you will have the opportunity for upward mobility, both at your specific company or at another one in the industry at large.”

Plans for the Berkshire Innovation Center were launched about a decade ago, when the city of Pittsfield received a $6.5 million earmark in then-Gov. Deval Patrick’s $1 billion life-sciences bill to construct a facility in the William Stanley Business Park. When the project moved forward in 2014, the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center provided an additional $3.2 million.

However, construction, originally scheduled to begin in 2015, was delayed after the original bids came in $3 million higher than expected. Since then, a coalition of state, local, and private-sector funding sources raised the difference, with the state coming through with the final $2.3 million earlier this year. Boyd was elected the BIC’s first president and board chairman in 2015, while Rod Jané, president of New England Expansion Strategies in Westborough, was hired as the BIC project director.

While planning the facility, the BIC has already begun developing and launching its programs, such as a speaker series that, since 2015, has conducted more than 10 speaking events on topics relevant to advanced manufacturers in the region. The featured speakers for these events have included executives from the medical-device industry, advanced equipment manufacturers, researchers from leading research universities in the region, workforce-development leaders, and career-center directors from colleges and universities.

“If you are qualified in this space and engage in a growth mindset and lifelong learning, you will have the opportunity for upward mobility, both at your specific company or at another one in the industry at large.”

Meanwhile, BIC workforce-training programs were launched in 2016, and have featured all-day training seminars on topics such as lean manufacturing and continuous improvement, thermoplastics for medical devices, and medical-device regulations. That same year, the first wave of advanced R&D equipment, acquired through grants by Berkshire Community College, and training for employees of BIC member companies on the advanced equipment has been ongoing.

Taken as a whole, Boyd said, the innovation center will essentially cast a net to attract and train the next generation for some of today’s most intriguing careers — and, in some cases, careers that haven’t even emerged yet. What is clear, he added, is that modern manufacturing jobs are a far cry from long-outdated stereotypes about factory floors.

“You don’t get dirty on the production floor,” he said. “Quite the opposite, at Boyd Technologies, they’re the cleanest spaces in the building. They’re precise and clean-room controlled and certified as such, and people that work there are mainly using computers. Of course, there are materials and all types of processes and actual manufacturing, but it requires statistics and technical reading and understanding of biocompatibility and sterilization methods. All these are things the workforce of today have to be cognizant of.”

The Berkshire Innovation Center promises to not only build that awareness, but provide the resources and partnerships to make the Berkshires a key part of a high-tech ecosystem that is no longer the exclusive domain of Boston and Cambridge.

Joseph Bednar can be reached at [email protected]