ToolingNet: an advanced-manufacturing partnership backed by the 21st Century Fund.

• Author: McKimmie, Kathy
• Position: Manufacturing and finance of technological innovations

WITH THE STEADY LOSS OF good-paying manufacturing jobs, the Indiana General Assembly took action in 1999, creating the 21st Century Research and Technology Fund to leverage other grants and investments, stimulate growth and diversity Indiana's jobs for the future.

The seed money provided to a grantee, typically less than $2 million in a two-year period, helps develop and commercialize advanced technologies primarily through partnerships between the state's universities and the private sector. Since its inception, the fund has approved $109 million on 85 projects that total $342 million when combined with matching funds from other sources. The next round of 21st Century projects, divvying up an additional $20 million in state funds, will be announced in the fall from applications received this month.

"There's a tremendous demand for 21st Century funding," says Tony Armstrong, the fund's director. "Unfortunately, we're not able to fund as many as we'd like." The approval rate has run about 12 to 15 percent since the program began, he says. In the last round, 117 were received but only 21 were approved

The tough choices on who gets what is made by out-of-state peer reviewers (to avoid conflict) who follow the same basic guidelines as the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation in awarding their grants, says Armstrong. A cash and in-kind match must be at least one-for-one. Projects approved to date have ranged from development of entertainment video over the Internet to minimally invasive orthopedic implants to fire-retardant plastic fiber-optic cable.

One project that's trying to take a common part of the manufacturing process and make it shine is ToolingNet, which received $1.7 million from the hind last year to develop an online collaborative marketplace for the state's tooling industry.

ToolingNet focuses its attention on one of the most primary aspects of manufacturing: tooling. For the creation of metal parts, for example, the tooling industry turns out machine tools used in the cutting, shaping or finishing of materials. "In plastics, it's called a mold and it's a negative impression of a part that you want to make," says J.R. Spitznogle, president of Indianapolis-based Global Plastics.

"Tooling is really the basis for any manufacturing," says Nainesh Rathod, president and CEO of Imaginestics, a 2-year-old software development company located in the Purdue Research Park that's operating as the project manager of...