Since leaving the nest at the Shady Grove Innovation Center in Rockville for a 15,000-square-foot Gaithersburg office last year, OpGen has grown.

The biotech, which focuses on single-molecule DNA analysis technology and genomic mapping, has continued to add jobs in the recession, beefing up to 60 employees from 44 last fall.

"Things are going well," CEO Neil Doheny said last week during a celebration of the 10th anniversary of Montgomery County's Business Innovation Network incubator system.

Such words are music to the ears of officials such as Steven A. Silverman, director of the county's Department of Economic Development.

"The system is a model for Maryland and the country on how to do it," Silverman said underneath a tent outside the Shady Grove Innovation Center, the county's first incubator that opened as the Maryland Technology Development Center in 1999.

During the past decade, more than 90 companies have graduated from the county's five incubators, creating 1,800 jobs and occupying about 625,000 square feet of commercial space, officials said. Besides Shady Grove, centers are in downtown Rockville, Wheaton, Silver Spring and Germantown.

A decade ago, the idea was not so popular, said Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett (D). "Some people said that government should not assist businesses this way," Leggett said.

Having access to wet labs, conference rooms, receptionists, consulting, seminars and other resources, usually at lower costs than businesses can find on their own, is invaluable to small startups, said Sung Ho Hahm, president and CEO of RafaGen. The company, which focuses on next-generation gene expression systems, has been at the Shady Grove center for about two years.

Small lab spaces can be very hard to find in the commercial office market, said Yvonne Rosenberg, president of PlantVax, a recent graduate of the Shady Grove center.

Besides recognizing recently graduated companies, which also included BioFactura, InterSpace and Translate TV, officials handed out awards to key people who helped form the county's incubator system. Honorees were former deputy directors of the county economic development department Henry Bernstein and Duc Duong; Dyan Brasington, former president of the Tech Council of Maryland; David Edgerley, former economic development director and former secretary of the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development; Hans Mayer, former executive director of the Maryland Economic Development Corp.; and Philip Singerman, former president of the Maryland Technology Development Corp.

Public officials had the easy roles of obtaining funding to help entrepreneurs, said Edgerley, now an executive with HarVest Bank of Maryland in Gaithersburg. "It's humbling to see what others have done," he said.

Montgomery has about one-quarter of all the incubators in Maryland, said Edgerley, who along with county incubator manager John Korpela helped form one of the first in the state in Allegany County in 1983. The Technology Advancement Program at the University of Maryland, College Park, opened at about the same time and bills itself as the state's first technology incubator.

Other incubators are in Annapolis, Baltimore, Columbia, Hyattsville, Largo, Frostburg, Hagerstown and Waldorf, among other cities.

Studies have shown that government spending money on incubators is the most effective way to create jobs, Singerman said.