3 tenants consider Eau Claire center; New NanoRite park puts emphasis on tiny technology
BYLINE: KATHLEEN GALLAGHER, Staff, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Eau Claire's new $5 million NanoRite Technology Park is aiming to have three new tenants by the end of the year, including a California-based defense contractor working with tiny electro-mechanical systems.
If certain appropriations are made by Congress, the California company could take as much as 8,000 square feet in the park, which opened Friday, said Bill Ihlenfeldt, president of Chippewa Valley Technical College. Ihlenfeldt declined to name the company.
In an era when things increasingly come in small packages, Chippewa Valley and several partners are hoping to build the new park into a business and training center that specializes in manipulating materials at microscopic levels.
The park already has one major tenant: a unit of Woodville-based OEM Fabricators Inc., a $25 million company that does fabricating and machining for big equipment such as mining and construction machines. The company's OEM Micro division will occupy 5,000 square feet in the 40,000-square-foot center, which is connected to Chippewa Valley Technical College's manufacturing and technology education center.
Along with the California defense contractor, NanoRite is talking with another defense contractor and a start-up working to develop a new process for manufacturing the type of stents used in heart procedures, Ihlenfeldt said.
"My hope is that before the end of the year we'll be full," he said.
The plan for the center was conceived in 2003, after Wisconsin manufacturers said at a technical school system conference that they wanted help becoming more productive and developing expertise in advanced technologies. A survey of medical device makers in Minneapolis - about an hour away from Eau Claire - confirmed that nanotechnology and other sciences that deal with very small parts was becoming more important to that industry.
A consultant involved with the project from early on was Jack Uldrich, who has a company called NanoVeritas and wrote the book "The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business."
The NanoRite park has six suites with wet labs and other infrastructure necessary for clean rooms. Tenants and students also have access to a microscopy lab for optical measuring, a Micro Electro Mechanical Systems lab, and two training classrooms. It is focused on three technologies: nanotechnology, micro fabrication, and micro machining, a technology developed for watch-making that uses Swiss Screw machinery with ultra-fine cutting and fast spindle speeds.
The Chippewa Valley doesn't have a major research university like the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So NanoRite organizers early on realized they needed to partner to build critical mass, Ihlenfeldt said. The park is a partnership between Chippewa Valley Technical College, UW-Eau Claire's materials science center and UW-Stout's science and technology programs.
One of its goals is to build an industrial area that can supply Minnesota's medical device manufacturers, he said.
The Chippewa Valley has always been good at building partnerships between businesses, technical colleges and the UW System, said Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council.
The partnership that is building NanoRite has a good shot at producing skilled workers in areas where industry has said there are needs, Still said.
"I truly think the technical colleges are Wisconsin's secret weapon, and 95 percent of their graduates stay in state," he said.
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