INDEPENDENCE, Ohio — The Ohio Third Frontier program is offering some new grant opportunities for biomedical companies and researchers in the coming year — one, thanks to the availability of federal economic stimulus dollars.
Representatives of Ohio’s technology economy-development  project visited Northeast Ohio Friday morning to talk about the ways (ppt) local organizations and businesses can tap the $133.5 million that will be available for grants in fiscal 2010.
“We can speak a little more affirmatively now that we have a state budget,” Norm Chagnon, the project’s executive director, told the group of several hundred people at the Embassy Suites hotel in Independence. The ferment “over the state budget has really not impacted the resources that we have available for the Ohio Third Frontier in 2010 and probably fiscal year 2011, so are maintaining an aggressive posture in terms of the dollars that we’re making available.”
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Ohio Third Frontier, the $1.6 billion project that is scheduled to sunset in 2012, has granted almost $900 million since its 2002 start, Chagnon said. He and other Third Frontier leaders already are talking about how to raise money for a second generation of the state’s most aggressive economic development project.
Third Frontier and its guides at the Ohio Deparment of Development tried to tailor this year’s programs to the ongoing economic recession in which Ohio’s unemployment rate has surpassed 11 percent.
“We are cognizant of the dire economic conditions generally that folks are facing, particularly small, technology-based businesses,” Chagnon said. “We are seeking shorter-term impacts … trying to put more dollars in the hands of organizations that are near-to- market opportunities.”
The new R&D Center Attraction Program would take advantage of federal stimulus money to make up to $25 million exclusively for property, buildings and equipment available to state-supported universities or non-profit organizations. The organizations would use grants of up to $5 million to establish new centers of excellence that do some applied research in one of the Third Frontier’s technology focus areas, Chagnon said.
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Taking a page from its playbook for devleoping a fuel cell industry in Ohio, Third Frontier has expanded is Cluster Development Program with grants of up to $10 million for medical imaging companies and up to $7 million for biomedical companies.
“We wanted to take advantage of lessons we had learned from our previous investments,” Chagnon said. “We’re doing much more and being aggressive at  recognizing burgeoning technology clusters that have arisen from the background noise in areas such as medical imaging, photovoltaics, fuel cells and the like.”
The grants for up to $1 million “are for near-term market opportunities,” he said. “These are market-validated areas  in which we’re seeing lots of business activity.” The grants largely would help companies develop industry supply chains. “In all cases, the dollars are being made available to help fund companies to overcome technical hurdles, or reduce the cost of components or systems,” he said.
Third Frontier also committed up to $11 million to entrepreneurial support organizations and pre-seed investment funds that have received past grants. Making grants only to past grantees during this round is aimed at enabling the organizations to invest more time and money in companies that, in turn, already have invested in.
“We’ve heard loud and clear from companies and from the investment capital community is that the restraints on investment have made it very difficult in the private markets for companies to find dollars, and we’ve been asked to try to provide dollars through the Third Frontier that will help to build on the runways for technology start-up companies to weather the storm,” Chagnon said.