Glancing up at a massive, aging skylight, Chris Van Buiten declared there would be no helicopter landing pad on top of the century-old, Old Town Hall in Stamford.
Sky”™s the limit after that, the Sikorsky Innovations head suggested.
In a stealth operation worthy of its newest secret helicopters, Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. swooped in to embed a high-tech incubator at the new Stamford Innovation Center, with the Stamford iCenter itself launching with a half-dozen startups in house, while hosting a Stamford Startup Weekend March 30 and April 1.
At the same time, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy confirmed he met in late January with IBM Corp. managers, without specifying the purpose of that meeting to include whether any deal is in the works to get the Armonk, N.Y.-based company to expand in Connecticut.
In one fell swoop initially engineered by Malloy aide Kip Bergstrom, Stamford finds itself with what it thinks will be a vibrant entrepreneur “hotel,” while putting an idle building in the center of downtown back to work.
While the Stamford Innovation Center has been in the works since last year, Stratford-based Sikorsky”™s participation came as a surprise.
“Anything that combines big businesses like Sikorsky and United Technologies with startups is ”¦ positive,” said Owen Davis, a partner in the Stamford office of PWC.
Down the street at the University of Connecticut Stamford, General Electric Co. runs EdgeLab, which trains students to build innovative solutions. Now Sikorsky will be working with real-world entrepreneurs.
“We”™re not that small little company you”™d expect to be here,” Van Buiten said. “There are still enormous problems we”™d want to solve that ”¦ have enormous value for our customers. As many smart people as we have at Sikorsky ”“ and I can assure you we have a lot of them ”“ we can”™t solve them all on our own ”¦ Today we”™re starting the process of collaborating with companies that don”™t even exist yet.”
Van Buiten added that Sikorsky has invited some of its “industry peers” to work with the company at the Stamford Innovation Center, without naming which ones. And he stressed that many of the Sikorsky challenges can be applied to a broader marketplace ”“ for instance, paint that could change the color of a helicopter at a whim of a pilot, a technology with obvious implications for the automotive market.
For Malloy, the question is now whether the time has come to paint the town blue, so to speak. In response to a question, Malloy did not dismiss the idea of introducing area high-tech titan IBM to the facility.
“IBM has 2,500 employees in Connecticut and we are in constant contact with IBM,” Malloy said. “We”™re in touch with all the innovators in the state on a regular basis ”“ in fact, I happened to have a conversation in Washington (in late January) with IBM ”¦ The meeting wasn”™t about this particular facility, but suffice it to say we are in pretty regular contact with them.”
IBM is two years into its own global entrepreneurship initiative, among other perks giving startups free access to software applications and cloud-computing platforms, and running its own IBM SmartCamp startup competition. This year”™s Northeast winner was Localytics, a startup based at the Dogpatch Labs entrepreneurship center in Cambridge, Mass., where it is creating analytical software to help digest information gleaned through apps.
On a far more limited level, Sikorsky and its Hartford-based parent United Technologies Corp. plan to challenge local engineers and entrepreneurs with a series of specific problems it wants to solve, likewise with an eye on apps ”“ of the aerial variety.
“We would love to have an apps kind of environment in our rotorcraft where we can quickly add different applications to improve the functionality and safety of the helicopter,” Van Buiten said. “Pulling up Angry Birds isn”™t that important a mission-critical thing.”
