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At YBI, they share wealth of knowledge
By GRACE WYLER
youngstown
As the national media spotlight continues to shine on downtown’s emerging high-tech cluster, the success of the Youngstown Business Incubator has caught the attention of three longtime industry professionals eager to be a part of the city’s changing business landscape.
Inspired by the incubator’s enterprising spirit and open-source culture, Marv Schwartz, Jeff Hermann and Jack Scott — successful businessmen with more than a half-century of combined experience — have become fixtures at the downtown tech campus in the last year.
The Northeast Ohio natives have been sharing their expertise with the incubator’s budding entrepreneurs to help the eight portfolio companies commercialize their ideas and bring their products to market.
Schwartz, a Cleveland native with a doctorate in computer science, is the incubator’s chief science officer, a role he took on for free.
A successful high-tech entrepreneur and adjunct professor at Case Western Reserve University, Schwartz launched Noteworthy Medical Systems, an electronic medical records company, in 1998 and took the startup business to a $50 million valuation.
In this role, he meets weekly with the incubator’s portfolio companies to work on strategies for commercializing their technology and finding markets for their software.
“Marv is a serially successful technology entrepreneur and a brilliant business strategist,” said Jim Cossler, the incubator’s chief executive. “He chose to devote 100 percent of his time to Youngstown because he likes what’s going on here.”
Schwartz said he was attracted to the incubator because of its open-source culture.
“Collective wisdom is always going to be better than just one person,” he said. “Here, unlike most other places I have been, the cost of being involved is that if you have expertise, you are expected to share it.”
The incubator’s collaborative environment, although relatively rare in the high-tech industry, allows companies to come up with a better product at a lower cost, Schwartz added.
Hermann, senior vice president of client solutions with the Nielsen Company, also was attracted to the incubator because of its collaborative culture.
Hermann, a Brookfield native, returned to the area about a year ago and was splitting time between his New York City office and his home office in Canfield. He read about the incubator in Inc. magazine.
Hermann asked Cossler if he could work out of the Inspire Lab, the collaborative workspace on the incubator’s first floor.
When he is in town, Hermann shares lunches, ideas and pearls of wisdom with some of the incubator’s 300 entrepreneurs. Recently, he has been working with portfolio company Flash Notes on its business-growth plan and marketing approach.
“It’s a blast,” Hermann said. “It’s great to see this happening in Youngstown — people coming here with different experiences to drive innovation.”
Like Hermann, Youngstown native Scott recently returned to the Valley after many years. Scott, the former president of Parsons Corp., a global engineering and construction firm, has located his company Applied Systems and Technology Transfer in the incubator.
The company will help incubator startups find markets for their software products, particularly in the federal government. AST2 also has helped launch Ohio Clean Technologies Group, a joint venture with M-7 Technologies, an incubator portfolio company.
The group, based on a for-profit incubator model, will identify advanced clean technologies and help market them to the federal government, Scott said.
He said he decided to relocate his company from Salt Lake City to Youngstown to be a part of the city’s emerging high-tech industry.
“A major part of the decision to come here was to be a part of the change in this area,” Scott said. “The vision of transforming Youngstown from the Rust Belt to a tech belt.”
The involvement of talented, successful professionals such as Schwartz, Hermann and Scott is evidence that the perception of Youngstown is changing, Cossler said.
“It shows that there is something interesting happening in our community,” he said. “When you can attract world-class talent, I think it says that there are some real high-value things happening here that we ought to celebrate.”