BusinessReport.com

Eddie Ashworth has a tendency to switch careers every seven or eight years, so it comes as no surprise that he stepped down as president of the Louisiana Technology Park and Research Park Corporation, which he has led since 2000.

In his past lives, Ashworth has worked for the Southern Poverty Law Center, founded an oil-and-gas exploration company, been a partner in a Washington, D.C., law firm and edited copy at a daily newspaper.

Effective April 7, he took over as undersecretary of the state Department of Social Services. He’s taking a 60% pay cut, but says he’s fulfilling a lifelong dream of public service. Vice President Stephen Loy has been named interim president.

The 220,000-square-foot technology park on Florida Boulevard contains an incubator, a Tier IV Internet data center and 120,000 square feet of office space. Of the $3.8 million in its current budget, about $1.4 million comes from the state, thanks to a cooperative agreement signed with former Gov. Mike Foster that ends this year.

Business Report met with Ashworth at the Tech Park—which he says is ready to become self-sufficient—on his last day on the job.

Question: What sort of companies do you try to attract to the incubator?

We look for early stage technology companies. We’re not looking for startups. We bring too much technology and support services to bear to bring in startups because they just can’t use what we’ve got. There are other incubators around—Southern has an incubator, LSU has an incubator—for a pure startup company. They’ve got to have a business plan; that is kind of the application. The other thing we look for is growth prospects. We want companies in here that have the capability to grow to a significant size. Most companies won’t do that, but that’s the kind of company we’re looking at.

One out of every 10 or 15 companies in here will hopefully have significant growth. The archetype for what we’re looking for would be a TraceSecurity. Came in here with probably five employees. When they left here, counting people working outside the state, they were probably around 70 employees.

Q: How do you decide how long a company should stay in the incubator?

There are three exit strategies, if you will, that we’ll see. First of all, we’ve had companies, the model’s not working and the funding sources decide to pull the plug on the financing, and they go off.

Or they flatline, all the growth stops, and it kind of levels off. That’s another place where we’d like to unplug them and plug in a company with greater growth prospects. We look at the number of employees, we look at their sales, we know what their salaries are, so we track that stuff on an annual basis. So we see, are they continuing to grow, or are they not continuing to grow.

And the third model is, they simply outgrow us.

Q: How do you recruit companies into the tech park?

I’ll say, candidly, we have not identified a good approach. We’ve tried a lot of different things. If you look at our new program, Tech Park U, I think probably the youngest person is around 20; there may be someone less than 20. I think the oldest person is in their 50s, maybe even 60s. They’re men, they’re women, they’re students, they’re people who’ve got jobs. One person is actually a military officer. You tell me the common thread about that. So, how do you get at that group of people?

One thing we’ve thought about is, they’ve probably got a lawyer if they’re starting up a business, and they’ve probably got an accountant, so we keep close tabs with those people. We do a lot of presentations, we do trade shows, we do a lot of [media].

Q: Is there an argument to be made that we should have fewer state-funded tech parks and incubators but fund them better?

I do think Louisiana historically has not done a good job with targeting its resources. When you are a poor state, you have got to pick your battles. Figure out where it makes sense to make the investment, then target sufficient resources to be. We can certainly create superior facilities, and they need to be adequately funded.

Q: What are some of the other success stories, besides TraceSecurity and VoterVoice?

The data center has been another huge success story [The Tech Park’s data storage center, a major draw for the park, was purchased by Dallas-based PHNS last year from local firm Network Technology Group for an undisclosed sum. NTG had purchased the data center from Solid Systems. The data center continues to operate at the site as before]. When people talk about economic development, they classically think of creating jobs.

Q: One of the knocks against the Tech Park incubator has been that it’s usually pretty full, but they don’t graduate enough companies.

There is some merit to the criticism, but it’s not one that’s unique to us. There are two pieces to an incubator business model. You’re dealing with early stage companies and you’re trying to help them along, so there’s kind of a service component, an economic development component to it. Then there’s the hard, green eyeshade business component to it. Their real estate business is space that you rent out for money. The tension is, if you don’t have a waiting list of qualified companies to come into the space, and you’ve got a company that has leveled off, but they’re continuing to be a good business, do you want to take them out and leave that space vacant, or do you let them continue on even though if you had a better company to plug into that space you would do so?

We believe there is a synergistic value in having people around. They mingle, they do business with each other, and they get ideas from each other. I’d love to have a long waiting list, but we’re a long way from being a tech Mecca.

Q: The cooperative agreement the Tech Park signed with the state in 2000 runs out this year. Is it ready to be self-sufficient?

We feel like we’ll be able to continue to operate the facility in the same form that it’s been operated, which provides highly subsidized services to companies. That’s our model, and that’s the model we’ve spent the last three years to make sure that we can continue to operate at the end of the cooperative endeavor agreement, and we’re there.