Center for Small High-Tech Firms to Open at UC Irvine

UC Irvine will be home to the state’s first center for small, high-tech business development, officials of the U.S. Small Business Administration said Friday.

The Small Business Development Center--funded by the SBA, corporate sponsors and the California Department of Commerce--will be housed at the university’s Graduate School of Management.

An initial grant of $207,000 will be available when the center opens in September, and funding will rise eventually to $750,000 annually, said Sandy V. Sutton, assistant district director for business development at the SBA office in Santa Ana.

The agreement to start operating the center is expected to be signed later this month, she said.

The center will provide free counseling to small, fast-growth technology companies in the state. Among its functions will be helping technical researchers and entrepreneurs develop business and marketing plans for newly developed high-tech products and conducting seminars on marketing and management.

Unlike other SBA business development centers, which provide assistance to a broad range of small businesses, the new center will serve only high-tech start-up companies.

“We want to see results in the state’s research laboratories developed into businesses and find their way to the commercial market,” Sutton said Friday. “We hope to take innovative engineers and scientists and help them find their marketing components to start and run the business.”

A major reason for locating the center in Orange County is the large number of high-tech companies here, said Tiffany Haugen, director of Program in Innovation and New Ventures of UCI’s Graduate School of Management.

Haugen’s program, called Accelerate, helps rapidly growing high-tech companies expand even more quickly by offering them intensive management training.

UCI and SBA officials said that, while details are still being worked out, the Accelerate program will likely be incorporated into the new center. The facility will employ a director to oversee activities, a full-time counselor and three administrative assistants.

SBA’s Sutton said the new center was to have opened in early summer, but officials at Fullerton College and Valley Economic Development Center, a Van Nuys nonprofit organization that assists small businesses in Southern California, protested after they lost in bids to have the center on their premises.

Wilma Berglund, Valley’s marketing director, said her company was told that it did not provide adequate evidence and documentation that it is a nonprofit organization. “We lost the contract through a technicality,” she said.

Fullerton College officials could not be reached for comment.