Incubator facilities offer growing biotech companies a variety of benefits, everything from personnel and equipment to the ability to look a little bigger than you actually are. Jim Hayward, who has close ties to Stony Brook’s biotech incubator program, describes his company’s experience: “It makes a big difference. We maintained associations with the campus. We would fund research, giving our own grants and contracts to faculty members or using central facilities like NMR or electron microscopy, or mass spec, and so we were able to do more science. The benefit to us is we ended up looking like a much bigger company than we were, and we had the capabilities of a larger company because of access to equipment. I still think that it’s a wonderful model, and when it’s working properly, an incubator graduate, as we did, should graduate to a nearby tech park, let’s say, stretch the umbilical cord just a bit and establish a firm footing,” so that ideally “the company, in addition to being local, can come back to the campus and spawn new companies, which is what we kept doing.”
