New Albany tech incubator hatched - Business First of Columbus:

New Albany tech incubator hatched - Business First of Columbus:

New Albany and TechColumbus have created a business incubator in the village that will widen the organization’s reach in fostering tech development in the region and satisfy the village’s push to step up economic development.

The New Albany Business Development Center opened this week at the New Albany Business Park off West Campus Oval. The goal of the center is to turn ideas into jobs, said Stephen Anderson, a business development professional for TechColumbus, which runs the area’s biggest incubator off Kinnear Road in Columbus.

“We wanted to assist them (New Albany) in their endeavors to create a tech economy,” he said Thursday.

Jennifer Chrysler , community development director for the village of New Albany, hopes the center will help bolster the village’s economy.

“We wanted to be able to attract small businesses as well as large corporations to the region,” she said.

The center will provide a variety of services to business developers and entrepreneurs, Anderson said, including business coaching, and access to investment capital and a small-business development center. Consulting services and attorneys also will be available to the entrepreneurs.

“The hope is to bring in all these resources and layer them in to help these businesses,” Anderson said.

The New Albany Business Development Center parallels a similar endeavor by TechColumbus across town, where it helped to open the Dublin Entrepreneurial Center this year. Both suburban incubators have been in the works for almost two years. Though the two have similar concepts, the centers will “have their own identity and their own purpose,” Anderson said.

The new center also will house a TechColumbus office, the New Albany Chamber of Commerce and Platform Labs, a company that helps businesses conduct information technology test projects. Anderson said having companies such as Platform Labs at the center will give the nascent businesses direct access to certain services.

Creation of the New Albany Business Development Center and the Dublin Entrepreneurial Center were funded by state grants and private investments. New Albany contributed $750,000 toward its project, which was complemented by $1.5 million from the state’s Third Frontier technology development program.