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Tedco partners with Larta Institute

Thursday, Dec. 15, 2005

Maryland’s emerging technology companies can now find targeted advice and assistance on marketing, financing and management from the Larta Institute, a Los Angeles nonprofit that signed an agreement last week with the Maryland Technology Development Corp.

‘‘We manage programs that help companies innovate and grow and we bring together people, technology and capital to drive the innovation process,” said Larta CEO and founder Rohit K. Shukla.

Shukla was the keynote speaker at ‘‘Commercializing R&D: Resources for Emerging Technology Companies” an all-day conference Dec. 8 in College Park attended by about 200 entrepreneurs and business advocates from throughout the region.

In one Larta program, ‘‘we sift through a long list of technology companies in our NIH-funded Commercialization Assistance Program to find commercial relevance,” Shukla said. The institute then makes a selection of the 120 most promising companies and invites them to its annual forum in California to make a formal presentation.

The company has similar programs to help commercialize technologies from the Advance Technology Program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency.

He said Larta ‘‘goes through a scenario program of identifying for each of their selected companies new tools, insights, networks and industries.”

‘‘But we don’t spend a lot of time working [directly] with the companies. We show them how to do things themselves. It’s a remote mentoring, is what we do,” Shukla said.

He said Tedco has become one of the Larta Institute’s first affiliates and will serve as the investment adviser to Maryland companies. The arrangement is cost-free.

‘‘Tedco has a lot to learn from Larta and what we bring to Larta is a lot of local knowledge and skills,” said Phillip Singerman, executive director of Tedco. The agency handles $1.5 million in state money for grants, Singerman said, and last year also funneled almost $3 million in federal money to in-state military programs that had partnerships with Maryland technology companies.

Singerman said a Tedco employee heard Shukla speak about Small Business Innovation Research grants at a conference at NIH in Bethesda this summer. The employee called Singerman immediately.

‘‘I said yes. I have known Rohit for many years, and so we decided to form an agreement to work with them,” Singerman said.

‘‘Why are we such great partners?” Shulka asked at the conference. ‘‘Maryland is extremely fortunate to be at the core of federal technologies. Increasingly it will be recognized in the investment world as the principle driver of technology in the U.S. And it is very important that we have a first class organization like Tedco on the ground. They will serve as our technical advisers with [innovation research grants] and many other programs.”

Shukla was emphatic in prodding small, ‘‘nimble” technology companies to look beyond the core of their technologies and to ‘‘live up to the promise of your science.”

‘‘We are looking for gazelles who can think globally,” he said.

‘‘With Asia coming on line, you need to be innovative,” Shukla said. ‘‘Global technology is no longer limited to the brilliance of America.”

Larta works with key nations, including Australia, Israel, India, Japan and Finland, to match U.S. startups with similar firms overseas.

Leaders of four emerging Maryland companies also spoke at last week’s conference, including Sheila Connelly, co-founder and vice president for development at Advanced Vision Therapies Inc. in Rockville.

‘‘We are in the incubator labs at the Maryland Tech center and have received seven [Small Business Innovation Research grants] so far,” she said. She added that the first was a fast-track award to fund new gene therapy for age-related macular degeneration, in partnership with the National Eye Institute, part of NIH in Bethesda.

The event was co-hosted by Tedco and the Tech Council of Maryland. Topics included: seed, angel and venture funding; corporate partnering opportunities with biotech and advanced technology companies; innovative federal funding programs; intellectual property protection and ownership; trends in regulatory requirements; and successful commercialization strategies.

For more information, call Tedco at 800-305-5556.