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Unlike your future with a x MBA from Lehigh Business, t is a business incubator?

Well, think about the hasss of starting a new business.

You need a place to operat.

You need power and plumbing office equipment benefits r your employees a payroll system, internet access ana million more things you ner thought about when all you wanted to do was start worn your new idea.

Business incubators offer e chance to grow, operate and connect with other small businesses.

Today on Lehigh Valley Ris, we're visiting three diffet incubators and meeting somf the most interesting new entrepreneurs in the regio.

One of the few incubators dedicated primarily to manufacturing happens to bn Allentown Ridge Works Enterprise Center set up sp in an Old Mack truck facily several decades ago.

Today you'll find entrepres and makers of all different kinds of fields from plasts and scientific equipment to wine, beer and more.

Let's find out what makes s building such a great placr new businesses.

The incubator is a facilitr of business development hen the Valley.

We want those early stage companies to come in here o grow and prosper.

Graduate from the program d then move into other builds within the Valley.

I'm surrounded by people wo are running their own comps trying to grab their piecef the pie.

We're all in different industries operating out of bridge works is conveniento really put it in one word.

So this is another one of y wins.

This is a sauvignon blanc, which I actually drove mysf to Long Island to pick up.

I am essentially a one man show.

It takes away a lot of headaches that a new busins owner would face otherwise.

Manufacturers in the lifebd of the Lehigh Valley.

If you look nationally at business incubators, a majy of incubators are technoloy based, office based, etc Bt believe it or not, only 4%r fewer are actually manufacturing bases.

Ours is manufacturing focud the reason why ours is we believe successful is becae we have a lot of the resous that manufacturers want.

The building here was a manufacturing facility forc cars and trucks.

Work is a good facility and they have done a wonderfulb of getting it here.

How they made established facilities for utilities Bb Casey is the main thing fo.

The winery started in 2014n my basement.

My wine is kosher certifie.

Can I talk about the loadig dock?

I love the loading dock.

The loading dock might be y favorite place bridge Berk.

It's just a goal nightmareo lose that much wine from a gallon tank of wine weighs about a ton to be able to k that truck up right into te loading dock.

In this former Mac trucks factory is very useful.

Otherwise we'd be heavy lifting, I guess with our s Gordon.

Most people don't know what cryogenics is.

People who are hard our and think about freezing bodies today.

Human beings can be frozen alive.

OK, so that's Merrick Garld and Dennis Orefield of extremely low temperature.

Hi, I'm Jeff from we're ine cold Edge Factory Facility.

This is NeoWolf.

He is going to raise this flange on to this copper se here.

This radiation shield is ud in a cryogenic application.

It's a shield between ambit temperature and cryogenic temperatures.

This is going to help us achieve real cold temperats when we run our system, our equipments go to the scienc community.

They all have their own requirement.

We don't build the same sym twice.

What a problem you have.

There are people here who n help you for example, you e plastic shop right next to.

We use them for I'm going o to Bucks made today and sel to.

We're making an electronic enclosure, so we service te medical through electronic enclosures when coronavirus hit.

We got a lot of business because of that.

So we service some medical customers that directly see as the hospital.

So we make enclosures thato on oxygen tanks.

We make knobs that go on different gas administering tanks and hospital rooms aR and things like that.

So I was for a lot of yearn the buyer side, so I was bg injection molded parts andn selling on to different clientele.

And I heard of the incubatr program, which I was workig with the old director.

What we have here is what's called the screw picker.

This robot reaches down ine the mold after the cycle is complete and it grabbed whs called the runner.

That runner is then taken n the back and it's ground up simultaneously as the nextt is made.

Now what falls into the conveyor is the completed heart.

And then when that runner m the last shot is ground upr material loader will pull m the ground up material as l as fresh material and mix n at a certain ratio and blen for the next shot.

We have a complete closed p system.

It's just absolutely amazio have just the conversationn the hallway and just the relationships with the peoe and also the program direcs and things that you can len with the drop of a dime.

One walk up the hallway anu can answer a question at y.

If you were in some buildig somewhere by yourself, youd have a hard time really geg the right answer to ADC in general is on your side.

They want you to be succes.

When we started in 2015, wd two machines and one custor and now we're four machines close to 35 and we're runng 24 seven on all four of our machines.

The goal of all the busines in the building is ultimaty to move out.

I know that I'm ready to expand.

We make money on time, so everything that we do is bd on how many parts we can me per hour.

I know that if I had the capacity and we'll be ableo better service our custome.

So we purchased the propery down the way and we're goio go pretty have you on the automation and really try o get better at what we do ad really refined in our new space.

I'm really excited about i.

There is some risk that wos me, but I truly believe thn life and especially in buss and entrepreneurship that u need to do the thing that scares you the most withoue risk.

You know, I wouldn't be hee today.

So we're just going to take that next one and really me sure that we can service or customers to the next levef being an urban winery.

I go out all over the placo vineyards and pick up grap, entrepreneurship, new busis ownership is a long marath.

It's not for the timid ands not for the faint of heart.

It takes a certain kind of person.

But being in the incubator environment and bridge wors and having ADC on your side There are plenty of excitig things happening up in Allentown at that old Mack truck plant, but just a few miles from Allentown and is sister city of Bethlehem bs from the old Bethlehem stel complex, you'll find partnership for innovationr Pie, a vibrant space for nw and exciting businesses wih the help and support of Pe, the Bethlehem economic Development Corporation.

Let's take a look.

PI since our partnership fr innovation.

A lot of people call us an incubator more of an affore space for startup companie.

Where entrepreneurs can coe start their company and grt through us.

.

Bethlehem Economic Developt Corporation, which we calld Girl who manages Pi Medco o nonprofit 501c3 staffed byy employees.

Bethlehem really has a rich history of entrepreneurshi, rich history of innovation started in Bethlehem Steel.

Now we're transitioning ino this new new economy new manufacturing.

We have Lehigh University Monroe County Community College.

We have Fab Lab at at NCC.

We have the Small Business Development Center.

So high is one cog in the Bethlehem entrepreneurial ecosystem.

History of this building.

It was an old silk mill I k was built in 1918.

We came in in 2011 and put money into the second floo.

I think a lot of the tenans like the loft style setting they like the hardwood flo.

It's one of those things we it's not too corporate, whh is what we love about it.

In PI, we have around 35 pe that are working out of the space right now.

We have an LED for a compa.

We have a toy company, go s was actually inspired by a homework assignment that Id in the technical entrepreneurship program at Lehigh had to take a manufacturing method and jt do something with it.

I took the method to make balloons and then made something that I thought wd be cute to like, draw on te ground like little chalk pt and then that evolved intoe durable paint balls that Ie on the market today.

We have food and beverage company Zafar's.

Zephyrus Brand that I stard offers different products that's associated with the precious saffron space.

So this is the product saf, which comes in the form of threads.

These are the threads thate from the saffron flower, wh only has three threads inse it.

The reason it is the most expensive is spice in the d is that you need like 80,00 flowers, which will be a fl football field to make a pd of saffron.

So you want to pick the fls you want to like.

Separate the threads with s the whole thing has done wh hands.

It's very labor intensive d this whole thing makes it pretty precious.

We also have it in the safn powder form, which comes io types of organic saffron, h is Pen Argyl mania certifid organic and the premium san we have now saffron, honey, saffron, vinegar, different products that's associatedh saffron spice.

As an immigrant Iranian entrepreneur.

Part of what I want to accomplish here in the Unid States is to build really cultural bridges out of fod and you know, Iran is very famous for its saffron and.

We are selling in the Unitd States as selling in Canad, and we just added the Unitd Kingdom.

Next is to get into the shs of grocery stores like Wegs or the fresh market.

Right now I have two emplo.

I have one person for packaging.

One person will help Sellersville the marketingd graphics and social media d it's a lot of me.

I do a lot of play puts a t of hats on my head to do different sort of work put product in it, which is enh protection as it passes the three test.

Just something like this.

But don't try it at home because you're not going to refund you if breaks.

It's been pretty good.

I've met different entrepreneurs here and you know, we talk about a lot f different problems of friendship and partnership here.

People helping each other.

We hear from our companiesl the time that they might ha question about packaging.

They might have a question about marketing.

Everyone stores open.

They might pop in and somee might have the answer.

It's so nice to be around r people that are doing simir things to you and especialy they're really doing it lie Ali kills it with his saffn product, Brianna.

We talk about a lot of% packaging problems.

Hey, how can we fix this?

She helps me out.

I help her out, which addso the Lehigh Valley is entrepreneurial spirit and.

We're really selective whet comes to finding those companies that want to be n active part of PI.

We do have another program called the Keystone Innovan Zone, so it helps to funnel money grants, internships d tax credits into these startups.

And so we really leverage e programs against each othe.

But we will go to events tt Lehigh will go to Northampn Community College.

We'll see, you know, bright young students that have te great ideas and then we'llt them.

And if they're interested n locating here, we'll find a space for them to get acced to the program and they hae some merits that helps, you know, any entrepreneur in e start of the process would dream up some, some grants.

There's like three interned printer and decent debt fre parking.

So all in all, a great spa.

The importance of a space e PI is that there is not a t of smaller assembly type se for companies that flex kif space.

You can find out in the industrial park there's tef thousands, hundreds of thousands of square feet, h is great.

We hope a lot of our compas get there, but this space really provides that to stp companies.

I don't view us as the cres of businesses we just try o support them on their way o growing companies, hiring l employees and really addino the economy of the city.

You can't throw a gobies pt ball in this state without hitting something named afr Ben Franklin, Pennsylvanias favorite Renaissance man ad founding father certainly t his mark.

But we think Ben would be especially proud to know he lent his name to the Ben Franklin Technology Partne, where some of the nation's smartest inventors are tacg problems.

Ben Franklin technology partners as a whole was std by the genius of the late, great Governor dig Thornbuh back in 1983.

Pennsylvania was moving frm true heavy manufacturing.

Back at that time in Goverr Thornburgh came up with ths idea that the Ben FranklinS would foster innovation.

We have 45 companies here d in our Tech Ventures facily 130,000 square feet from Wt Labs to incubation to offis as well.

Three companies come to mis it relates to what we're dg and how they're innovating.

One is life fair.

Our technology is a very comprehensive and aggressie air purification technolog.

I'm a trained reproductive physiologist, so we learn e significance of very low ll airborne pathogens that wee common to all IVF laboratos and we learned the signifit impact of these pathogens n clinical pregnancy rates.

And I was shocked that thee was nothing commercially available that would delivr the air that we now knew we needed and that was the ges of the life our technologyd the genius of Dr Warlow cao came to being, as you said, Well, if I can't go out any it, I might as well just bt it myself and because our l was to protect the human embryo, we set the design r exceptionally high.

In other words, our goal wo be able to kill the anthrax spore and the anthrax spors the most difficult pathogeo kill.

Our technology destroys all bacteria, infectious bacte, viruses and fungi.

The life care system massie and highly effective in completely destroying the Covid-19 virus as well as l of its variants.

This is a groundbreaking technology that came from o 15 years of research and iw proven in in vitro fertilization.

Health care and senior livg and we are proud now not oy to be offering it to those particular sectors but also protect those in the commel office setting and transportation.

Dr Warlow, I like to call r our genius in residence het Tech Ventures.

While she has graduated ouf our space, she is part of r tech ventures family, all f Ben Franklin technology partners right here on the Lehigh University campus is protected by our technolog.

Thread Therapeutics is uriy track infection detection organization.

Typically, the gold standad right now is culturing taks anywhere from 24 to 36 as h as 48 hours to get the ress back.

This has a lot of problems because if the patient does have an infection, then yoe wasting two or three days waiting to find out what te results are with the cultus that we are trying to brina rapid point of care test fr urinary tract infection Thd therapeutics have driven te technology into the physics of UTI eyes at the doctor's office at the physician's office within 20 minutes.

This is the first generatif new technology for urinary tract infection detection n the last 50 years.

Then one of my favorite organization is that I liko talk about is muscle polym.

This is where all the magic happens.

When they developed the fit it.He is based on a muscle.

Why is it that a muscle sts to a coral reef or a barnae sticks to a ship?

And yet it takes a jackhamr to get that off?

Well, it turns out the muse excretes a dope of proteind that dope a protein is responsible for adhering ta coral reef.

So this is where the sciene comes into play.

How do you create a bio mic adhesive that is literal Li able to glue things underw.

Polymers are plastics.

This is an example of a pie of plastic which came from polymers in order to synthe as a polymer, you need to t with monomers so we synthee our own monomers here.

So here, yeah, we're on our rotovap unit and right here we're purifying our monomer that will ultimately go ino our polymer.

We'll take this product he, put it into what we call an emulsion polymerization and string all these molecules together to make our poly catalyst irony.

Then the last step in the process is we have to actie our chemical.

That's what gives it all te active Catasauqua ingredies that allow it to do all the great things.

So we put it through this t we call a deep protection k and that activates the polr and then ultimately on thek end, we turn our polymers o our adhesives.

This is the end result thae are incorporating into our systems to make our adhesis bond underwater and to make other people's adhesives bd stronger.

So they developed this prot really to address our coral reef issues and be able to address that breakage of a coral reef so it regenerats itself.

But they found out very eay that their adhesive works e it's raining and they can e that adhesive on reefs to address roofing issues.

They're working with the dl industry for adhesive.

That is many, many times stronger than the adhesives that are placed in our mous today to fix our broken teh or whichever be the case.

We are here for the long tm to ensure that we are positioning our organizatis to be self-sufficient.

Ben Franklin provides the resources the network, the environment that allows uso grow and scale, and I can'y enough about Ben Franklin, technology partners in ther support well beyond capita.

Just a tremendous resourcef information and guidance fs as a company has just been absolutely invaluable.

It's not the financial supt alone that you get with Ben Franklin, it's the network.

It's the introductions, its the exposure they have to e a great idea, have a strong founder and a leader and te tenacity to just to reach t and say I need some assiste and help to grow and we'lle there for you.

Sometimes things you don't usually think about like ar purifiers or adhesive tapen make a big difference.

You can say the same thing about the Allentown Economc Development Corporation.

AC DC is just one of the my public private partnerships nurturing the future busins in the Lehigh Valley.

Our own Dr Georgette Phills recently sat down with Scot Unger, executive director f the ATC, to talk impact, invention, innovation and incubation.

Welcome Scott.

Thanks for having me.

Could you please tell us hw the Allentown economic the business community in e Lehigh Valley?

Sure, ATC is a private, nor profit economic development organization, and we have e primary programs.

One is the Bridge Works Enterprise Center, which ia small manufacturing incubar for startup manufacturing d companies.

Another one is our Urban Ss program where we take vacat and underutilized propertyn the city of Allentown and t it back into productive us.

Since 1979, we've done a we multitude of projects and f you accumulate all of those together, we've returned at 48 acres back to productive and then our last program s called Urban Made, which ir business retention and expansion program.

Where we do business visitations, try and understand, particularly wh the manufacturing sector n. If there are ways that we n help them and that the urbn made program also houses or economic development loan programs as well.

So well, tell me a little t more about the Bridge Works program and companies thate considering this program.

What are some things that y need to know?

Any company that comes to s looking to to start or entr into the incubation progra?

The first thing that they d to provide to us would be a business plan and a lot of entrepreneurs, you know, ty have ideas and they think t what they might want to do.

But actually putting that n into a concise plan is proy the first step.

And I think some people wod argue that, oh, it's so unnecessary.

I know what my plan is, bue truly believe that even thh I think most people who dos type of work would tell you that every time everybody creates a plan, it's almost always wrong and has to be amended.

It's an important step in e process where you kind of establish a baseline and tn as you move forward with yr brand new business, you can adjust, you know, in one direction or another which you've got to have that framework and baseline to o adjust from.

How has the incubator evole over time?

How has it changed or has t changed?

It has, and there's been evolution in a number of different, different ways.

I started at ATC in 2008, o obviously the incubator had already been in existence r quite some time and probaby around the year 2000.

And if it anything to do wh Y2K, there seemed like thee was some push towards tryio be a technology incubator.

So in 2009 we took a really careful look at a couple of things and one is we deterd that manufacture was a cril component in the Lehigh Va.

But particularly in Allentn that needed support and ned a champion and needed somee to say, Hey, this is import and to try and buck the conventional wisdom of Oh,s is a Rust Belt city manufacturing is dead becae we that just simply isn't e case, right?

The refocus on manufacturi, you know, led us to kind of gear our program more towas manufacture ring and that s some other implications.

The building is set up to n incubator, but manufacturis probably the most difficult incubation to do because, r example, a technology comp, if you have a software comy and you want to double thee of it, you can buy a lapton a chair and hire another pn if you want to double your manufacturing capacity, the infrastructure needs maybe utility and there's physicl things you need to do to te place the space, the physil plant to accommodate that.

So we have a business who s coming to you with their business plan.

It looks good.

What advice would you giveo this entrepreneur as to who expect from the next stagef their accepted into the incubator?

What can they expect?

One of the real key thingst we offer is kind of an intangible part of the pro, but we've got a building fl of people who know how to e things and they all know ho make different things.

And so the cross-pollinatif that where people can get something welded or get plc manufactured or find out at some technology without leg the building and you know, that's a real, tremendous intangible benefit.

We have.

We have a community of maks within a building right ino the peer to peer knowledge creation knowledge disseminatin.

Sure.

I mean, some of them have different issues.

But as startup businesses,y of them have some of the se issues too.

So there are some there's e commonalities, but then ths also some unique skills tht they share with one anothe.

Well, I wish you all the continued success, Scott.

Thanks so much for joinings today.

Thank you.

Thanks, Scott and Georgettr information and to see this episode and others go to p' 39 talk and share your thos I'm Valerie Bittner from af us at PBS39.

Thanks for watching.

We'll see you next time.

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