Bostinno
Innovation Abounds in the Mill City of Lowell, Massachusetts
By: Steven Tello
The hive of entrepreneurship activity is buzzing in Lowell, Mass., a vibrant urban mill city located just 35 miles north of Boston. With incubators, accelerators and makerspaces ready to support the next big idea, it’s no wonder that this city, recognized for its rich history and role in the American industrial revolution, is still defined by its innovation and ingenuity.
Home to the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Middlesex Community College, the entrepreneurship scene in Lowell provides a range of support that encourages the launch of low-tech, no-tech and high-tech business ventures.
The university leads the high-tech venture scene through the Massachusetts Medical Device Development Center (affectionately known as M2D2) and the UMass Lowell Innovation Hub (iHub). These two incubator spaces offer 45,000 sq. ft. of startup space, prototype and wet labs, co-working space and meeting rooms to medical device, biotech and other tech entrepreneurs. Open to all tech-based startups in the region, with or without a campus lead, the university currently hosts 65 startup companies in Lowell across three facilities.
These startups come to the university for space, equipment and knowledge resources. In addition to the resources available on site at the business incubators, UMass Lowell offers access to cutting-edge research facilities on its campus, a wide range of expertise from its faculty researchers and nationally ranked academic programs online and in person that help entrepreneurs gain the skills they need to be successful.
Entrepreneurial support is not, however, limited to UMass Lowell. The local community college, Middlesex Community College, supports its own entrepreneurship program in the heart of the city. Middlesex assists its students along the entrepreneurial path by sponsoring hackathons and pitch contests, and it even partners with UMass Lowell’s $50K DifferenceMaker Idea Competition.
UMass Lowell’s DifferenceMaker Program—which teaches students from all majors entrepreneurial skills they can apply in business and the community—has spawned 33 companies, eight patents and raised $2.5 million in external funding. An academic pipeline is, in fact, turned into an entrepreneurial pipeline through these collegiate collaborations.
Look to invisaWear, the winner of the 2016 DifferenceMaker Idea Competition, for an example of one of these thriving companies. Started by Rajia Abdelaziz and Ray Hamilton, both UMass Lowell graduates, invisaWear’s life-saving technology puts an inconspicuous alert system into fashionable jewelry.
But you don’t have to be a student to be a successful entrepreneur in Lowell. The Deshpande Foundation supports the EforAll program, a 12-week accelerator open to all that supports early-stage entrepreneurs with mentoring, skill development and funding. The Lowell-Lawrence program has helped create more than 160 new businesses since establishing a presence in Lowell in 2013 with the help of UMass Lowell.
Spaces and programs are wonderful, but access to mentors and funding is critical to the success of any new venture. Lowell is not shy in this regard. In fact, the network of resources offered in Lowell now rivals that of other startup hubs. Certainly, M2D2’s annual $200K Challenge is attractive to medical device and biotech startups, along with the opportunity to meet with corporate venture leads from Johnson & Johnson, Amgen, Boston Scientific, Waters and others.
Beyond this, M2D2 also engages a large circle of service providers—regulatory experts, product development teams and legal and patent attorneys—who can help inform the venture path for early- and later-stage startups. The iHub also engages a network of research specialists from the university who can assist in programming, product development, testing and related areas.
Housed in the same building as M2D2 and the iHub, the university’s NERVE (New England Robotics Validation and Experimentation) Center and Fabric Discovery Center each bring high-tech know-how and development skills to the table to help entrepreneurs turn a concept or idea into a prototype that can help secure early-stage funding. M2D2 and the iHub regularly draw investors from the greater Northeast to their events, providing startups an opportunity to talk directly with angel investors and VCs without the elbow-crowding chaos of an evening in Boston.
Speaking of funding, in addition to pitch contests and competitions, UMass Lowell operates its own River Hawk Venture Fund, which makes early-stage investments in the innovations and startups connected to this entrepreneurial ecosystem. To date, the fund has invested more than $650,000 in early-stage, tech-based startups located in the greater Lowell region.
The university also supports the development of SBIR and related grant funds that help move new technologies and companies forward before incurring the dilutive effect of equity-based investments. And once we get you in Lowell, we want you to stay. The Lowell Development and Finance Corporation operates a low-interest loan fund that encourages startups that come to the city to stay once they graduate from an incubator or accelerator program. Loans up to $100,000 are available to support fit-out and location in a Lowell-based property.
So, as they say, there is a lot to like about Lowell, especially if you are a startup looking for space, funding and knowledge resources. Check us out and see for yourself.
