Mainebiz

V O L . X X I I N O. X I X A U G U S T 2 2 , 2 0 1 6 18 G R E AT E R B A N G O R F O C U S "We work with 30 to 50 companies a year," says Mike Bilodeau, who's been director of the center for 13 years. "We've had a very longstanding relation- ship with the paper companies in Maine." Twin Rivers is one of the center's clients and pays fees for the Process Development Center's services. e center is a self-funding operation with revenues derived from research and industrial partnerships that support operational costs and the salaries of eight full-time employees and five to 10 undergradu- ate interns. Much of the center's work, Bilodeau says, involves conducting scale-up, proof-of-concept pilot demonstrations of technologies and processes. For clients, research is key to the partnership. "ey find it very cost effective to rent time on our equipment," Bilodeau says. Fail fast, fail cheap e center's mantra is "fail fast, fail cheap," says Jake Ward, vice president for innovation and economic development at UMaine. Clients such as Twin Rivers can schedule blocks of time in which they use the cen- ter's pilot papermaking machine to quickly test proto- types and make improvements for either existing paper grades or new products they hope to bring to market. With a new paper machine costing $700 million or more, and the need for efficient production on existing paper machines making it difficult to set aside time for even modest product testing, Bilodeau says compa- nies welcome the opportunity to use the center's pilot equipment for testing concepts and products without a great outlay of capital or using valuable produc- tion time. It's an insight that precedes his stint as the Product Development Center's director: Prior to join- ing the university in 2003, Bilodeau worked for the S.D. Warren mill (now owned by Sappi North America) in research, development and corporate engineering. "For somebody already making paper, we can tell them, 'Tweak this, or tweak that, and for a modest capital investment you can make this paper product,'" he says. Bilodeau says a client might spend weeks or even months with the center's staff researchers develop- ing formulas for new paper products they wish to test before actually scheduling trials on the pilot paper- making machine. "Typically, the trials run a week at a time," he says, noting that they might test as many as eight different prototypes. "en, from those trials, they might select the best candidate that we can scale up to do a mill trial." Ward adds: "It's not just a recipe, they've already done the taste test." "We have long been a proponent of the 'fail fast, fail cheap' model," says Twin Rivers' Deger. "e use of screening criteria in R&D and pilot testing ensures the best and most efficient design prior to go to larger commercial production on our paper machines. Trial time on our paper machine is a sig- nificant investment and there is a high-dollar cost for taking trial concepts and design of experiment work to our paper machines. e [Process Development Center's] work gives our team the best opportunity to optimize the design prior to getting to our paper machines, reducing development costs and ensuring a compression in timelines to commercialization." Target Innovation Center upgrades Moving Twin Rivers' R&D operations from Montreal to Maine puts it two hours closer to the Madawaska mill, which Deger says has the poten- tial to reduce costs by having the company's "oper- ating, technical, product development and sales and marketing teams working more cohesively in product and market development." e new wet laboratory in Orono will facilitate those efforts. But Twin Rivers also plans to offer its wet lab services to other companies in Maine and outside the state. "is offering should lead to addi- tional job opportunities as well," he says. Evan Richert, a land use planning consultant who wears multiple hats as Orono's town planner and president of the Bangor Target Area Development Corp., says the Target Innovation Center is a critical link in the region's economic development efforts. e Target Center has a mix of startup and more- developed "market" companies as tenants, which col- lectively have 48 full-time employees. e other tenant using the wet lab, Cerahelix, produces high-capacity water purification technology for the oil and gas and other industries. It outgrew lab space at the Target Center and inititated the conversa- tion about creating a web lab that eventually benefited Twin Rivers as well. "When Twin Rivers said they were looking for lab space, we knew the timing was perfect," Ward says. "at's why having the Target Center and it being plugged into the region's economic development net- works is so important. When the opportunities come up, there are people ready to make things happen." » C O N T I N U E D F RO M P R E V I O U S PA G E

• Cover