New York State Awards ETIC $625,000

New York’s Empire State Development, the state’s chief economic development agency, announced in November that New York Tech’s Entrepreneurship and Technology Innovation Center (ETIC) is among eight certified business incubators to each receive a five-year grant awarding $125,000 annually, totaling $625,000. 

This grant will help support ETIC activities to develop high-impact and experiential student engagement and training programs that raise New York Tech students’ business and technical skills. The funding will also provide continued assistance to New York State companies using the ETIC for their product or service ideas, business and marketing plans, technology-based innovations, and more.

The grant comes from the state agency’s Division of Science, Technology, and Innovation (NYSTAR), which identifies the ETIC as an innovation hot spot. As a certified business incubator, the ETIC is offered a range of support so that it may offer services and resources to entrepreneurs, local businesses, and more.

College of Engineering and Computing Sciences Dean Babak Beheshti, Ph.D., will be the principal investigator (PI) for the grant, with Director of the ETIC Michael Nizich, Ph.D., as program director.

As the grant kicks off on April 1, 2024, Beheshti says the ETIC will use the awarded funds to continue growing and advancing a variety of strategic goals, including:

• assisting ETIC companies in raising early-stage capital from affiliated investment groups through the evolution of ideas and the creation of early-phase technology prototypes
• contributing to the economic development of Long lsland and the wider region and fostering the success of newly established programs at the ETIC to recruit and engage entrepreneurial-minded students and students with existing New York State businesses
• fostering new ideas and innovation, providing entrepreneurs with new and recycled prototyping materials, and supplying startups and others with state-of-the-art technologies and laboratories, equipment, prototyping, and other supplies and services
• boosting workforce development by giving startups access to a skilled employment base of New York Tech students

This grant builds on federal funding awarded in 2013 when U.S. Senators Charles E. Schumer and Kirsten E. Gillibrand and then-Congressman Steve Israel announced a $625,000 grant to create the ETIC at the College of Engineering and Computing Sciences. The ETIC on the Long Island campus opened in 2015 and expanded to the New York City campus in 2022.  

“This state funding enables the ETIC to continue its mission to stimulate innovation in science, technology, and engineering by engaging startups and established companies with students and faculty,” Beheshti says. “The ETIC will serve as a model incubator in entrepreneurship and venture business practices.”