Dennis Anderson said he would still be sitting on his idea for using natural gas to stabilize wind energy production if it weren't for a technology startup grant.
The TECH2010 grant program gave five technology entrepreneurship grants this past spring, and now the program's leaders are seeking recipients for the next round of grants.
"I know there's a lot of good ideas that never move from the idea stage to the next stage," Anderson said. "When I saw this opportunity in the paper, I thought, hmmm, maybe I'll get serious."
He and his partner won $15,000 and have used the money to form a limited liability company, buy supplies, rent space at a discount in the Black Hills Business Development Center and hire a patent attorney to start the process on patenting their method.
The next stage, commercializing their method, is "an enormous task with lots of risks," Anderson said. But there will be help along the way. With the grant comes access to mentoring on business strategy and sales and marketing ideas.
Rapid City and the engineers and scientists associated with South Dakota School of Mines & Technology have the ability to innovate, but that's just part of the process, said John Gomez, TECH2010 chairman.
"Mines creates a lot of new products, but they never see commercialization," Gomez said. "I think we lack a little bit of the mentality that we can innovate here."
The money comes from a $500,000 2008 federal Small Business Administration grant procured by N2TEC - the National Network for Technology, Entrepreneurship and Commercialization. TECH2010 is a local group of professionals who hope to help create 10 technology startups in the Black Hills by 2010.
"The purpose of the program is actually to encourage technology entrepreneurship," Gomez said.
Engineers make good entrepreneurs, because they produce new technology, but it can be hard to find role models of successful business people who have taken those technologies to market, he said.
"If you as an entrepreneur have this idea, you're thinking of this thing and you're working in this garage, and you think it's going to work and it's going to revolutionize the world, we want to hear about it," Gomez said.
In the first round of grants, 20 applied and five received money. Just the process of applying and presenting their project to the board can be helpful, Gomez said.
"When we tell them no, it may be strong medicine for them to swallow, but we also tell them why," he said. "The chances of success are low, but hopefully by doing this ... then we up those chances."
The first five winners show the diversity of ideas out there.
KL Energy is using its grant to fund a feasibility study to determine how much waste-wood biomass is available in the region to be turned into ethanol.
While the company's $7,500 grant will fund just a small part of the product development, it has been helpful.
"In this economy, finding money or getting credit is challenging in its own right," project manager John Kelley said.
The grant helped sports news Web site Sports Buzzard "leapfrog" ahead in its development, said Jon Kellar, one of five partners involved, allowing the company to hire a software developer and to create a model that can be expanded to affiliate sites in other cities. It also gave them access to advice on how to turn their idea into a profitable business, Kellar said.
"The advice we get from Ray (Berberich) and John Gomez is worth more than the money," he said. "We're all fans of high school sports and were just watching the evolution of the new media if you will. It just seemed like a logical progression for us. What we haven't anticipated is all the software that goes into it."
While the company is still "cash neutral," Kellar said, the partners are well ahead of where they would have been without the grant.
For example, they got professional advice on how to set up an LLC, and it turned out to be easy.
"Things that now seem obvious," Kellar said, "we didn't know what to do."
