CLEVELAND — Employment in bioengineering is projected to grow 5% from 2022 to 2032, faster than the average for all occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What You Need To Know

  • CWRU is renovating one of its buildings into a business incubator 

  • This will help startup businesses in biotech, health tech and engineering 

  • The renovations for the building will cost about $50 million 

The people behind a new business incubator at Case Western Reserve University said it will be a community asset using the university’s technology.

Michael Oakes, senior vice president of resource and technology management at Case Western Reserve University, said the building is under renovation and will hopefully be open by Oct. 2026.

The incubator renovation will be done in stages, costing about $50 million.

“This purpose of this incubator is to become in some sense a nursery school for businesses leveraging technology in Northeast Ohio to grow, prosper, create jobs, attract talent and do good things in the world,” Oakes said.

Oakes said the incubator will allow the businesses to use its lab equipment. 

“We can have businesses coming from Miami, Florida, maybe as far as Australia that we’re already talking about that want to come to this incubator to be next to the university and all its resources, our hospital system partners and really be around that intellectual, scientific, engineering and of course actual laboratory equipment space,” Oakes said.

This space will be a magnet for bringing in new ideas and talent, Oakes said, noting the idea behind a modern incubator is human interaction. 

“There’s a huge social component to innovation and modern science, so we make the building, we design the building with the architects to facilitate that kind of interaction,” Oakes said.

Andrew Cornwell is the director for the business incubator. He said the process for a business to work out of the incubator is simple. 

“There’s an application online, it’s very straightforward, and after that we would talk about the physical space that you would need to rent to make your business successful,” Cornwell said.

Oakes said with the hospital partners and medical school, the business incubator will be an advantage. 

“The growth in biotech certainly Ohio is only going to go up,” Oakes said.