By Lisa Lopez Snyder
Contributing Writer

The buzz of construction work continues within sections of Innovista, the University of South Carolina’s $255 million, 500-acre “live-learn-work-play” research district in Columbia. Horizon I, one of a number of Innovista research buildings, is almost complete, and USC has already hired Brian Benicewicz, one of the world’s leading scientists in nanotechnology and fuel cell research, to lead the Center of Economic Excellence for Polymer Nanocomposite Research as its endowed chair.

Research conducted by Benicewicz and his eight-member team, who will occupy about a fifth of the 125,000-square-foot building by year’s end, will focus on polymer noncomposites and fuel cell research.

Yet, as positive as this development is, another side isn’t quite as glowing. Construction of Innovista’s Horizon II, which will house private-sector companies, has not yet begun. North Carolina developer Craig Davis’ problems with securing financing to build the facility have already pushed back the expected start date for construction by a year.

Executive Director John Parks is exploring options to move the development — and, most key, its financing — forward. He remains confident that Horizon II construction will have begun by February 2008 with an expected tenant move-in date of first- or second-quarter 2009. The five-story, 110,000-square-foot office building is one of four that make up two research areas, Discovery Plaza and Horizon Center, which includes Horizon I and Horizon II.

Within Discovery Plaza is the publicly financed Discovery I, which will house world-class biomedical researchers and other scientists, and Discovery II, to include private-partner research and office space, to be developed by Davis. Parks anticipates a shell of Discovery I to be complete this spring and ready for researchers to occupy by first-quarter 2009. Construction on Discovery II will start this summer, he said.

For businesses, Innovista provides an environment “for the entire life cycle of the company,” Parks said, a place that startup, growth-stage and established companies can call home.

While Parks said Innovista has several new prospective tenants and a lot of interest from companies, the challenge has been to get the private-sector buildings started. “It’s difficult to market until we have those buildings coming out of the ground,” he said.

If financing is found and new anticipated occupancy timelines play out, two of Innovista’s private-sector tenants, both high-tech firms, will physically call Innovista home, playing their part in helping to spark the growth of South Carolina’s new knowledge-based economy.

Collexis advances virtual searches
The opportunity to partner with a growing research institute like USC is what attracted Collexis Holdings, a knowledge software developer, to Innovista in October.

“Being in Columbia and being at the university gives us great opportunities,” said Bill Kirkland, Collexis CEO. In particular, he said, working with the university faculty, including using interns, “are all things beyond just a customer arrangement. That was very attractive to me when I was looking for a place to move our company.

“With this very aggressive vision for growth, it just seemed natural to bring a company here with what I consider next-generation technology. And with the university trying to grow aggressively, it’s a great partnership.”

Collexis is already using its signature “Fingerprint” patented technology to create a global virtual library for hydrogen fuel research in a new project with USC’s College of Engineering, School of Library and Information Sciences and SC Launch!, a funding body of the South Carolina Research Authority. The goal is to further hydrogen fuel cell research and make USC an international technology hub in this field. The resulting search engine will be free to South Carolina researchers and available online for a fee to researchers worldwide.

The company’s search technology identifies and builds a weighted list of research concepts from text sources, whether they’re documents, Web sites, e-mails or other digitized content.

The result is a virtual library that allows users to conduct high-speed online searches much more rapidly, accurately and deeply than traditional search engines do. Researchers can get answers to their questions and they can find directions for new research, Kirkland said.

Collexis is using this technology in a range of other projects, including designing knowledge disease dashboards for specific diseases and for BioMedExperts, a first-of-its-kind online social network to connect some 1.4 million biomedical researchers around the world with the networks of their peers to advance collaborations across scientific disciplines.

The company has partnered with Dell, which is providing the computer hardware to power the BioMedExperts network. “It’s the first type of collaboration that Dell’s done in the social networking market,” Kirkland said.

To create the network, Collexis has conceptually mapped the Pub Med database, the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journals, to build more than 5 million “knowledge” profiles of researchers from around the world. These profiles are based on researchers’ actual published works versus self-described expertise, Kirkland said.

In January, the NIH selected Collexis to develop an advanced expert profiling system to allow more than 8,000 NIH researchers to identify others who share their particular research via a Web interface.

Doing this kind of work at Innovista is “a good fit,” Kirkland said. “It makes perfect sense that we want to move into Innovista and be a committed part of the university’s growth.”

Italian company sees opportunities
In November the Loccioni Group, an engineering firm based in Italy, announced its plans to launch its first U.S. operation in Innovista. The company provides measurement and testing services for the automotive, health care, environmental control, energy and telecommunications industries, among others.

The company has 11 patented systems, including an injection system that optimizes engine behaviors in automobiles and a breath analysis system that medical researchers use to explore the link between lung cancer and the human breath.

“Our short-term goals are to start our subsidiary here and begin with purchasing and support services for our customers in the United States,” said Konrad Censi, North American director of operations. Long term, he said, the Loccioni Group aims to explore the North American market for its services and establish research and development opportunities with USC.

The company has already begun collaborations with faculty and students from the USC College of Engineering & Computing and other programs. Censi has shared materials for case studies in an industrial controls class, and an international MBA student from the USC Moore School of Business will start a four-month internship at the company’s Italy office beginning this May.

“The Innovista project is a perfect match between companies and universities,” said Censi. “Everybody was helpful with us and provided great information and assistance to achieve our goals. We immediately felt at home.”

Software firms eye growth
Duck Creek Technologies, an insurance software and services firm headquartered in Bolivar, Mo., was the first announced tenant at Innovista. In late January, however, its financing arm, Pequot Ventures, a New York-based $2 billion venture capital firm, pulled out of negotiations with Davis, the private developer. The decision means two other Pequot companies that develop insurance software and that were expecting to find a home in Horizon II — EagleEye Analytics and Dovetail Insurance Corp. — will await new developments.

“He has not been able to get the financing to meet our terms,” said Larry Wilson, Pequot venture partner, of Davis. But Wilson said the company is committed to moving onto the Innovista campus and is confident about Parks’ leadership and other options that are expected in the coming weeks.

“He will have a proposal for us soon,” Wilson said.