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SIRTI inks contracts with trio – Institute to help market, commercialize products made by companies here
The Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute (SIRTI) has signed contracts with three more companies to provide a mix of commercialization and marketing assistance and incubator space.
By Megan Cooley The Spokane Journal of Business
The contracts, which are with RehabLogic Inc., DAS Electronics Inc., and The WolfPac Group, bring the total number of such contracts that SIRTI handles currently to six, says Nigel Davey, associate director of the institute. SIRTI works with hundreds of other companies to a lesser degree, offering just a few hours of advice and services versus being an integral player in the companies’ growth, as it expects to be with these three concerns, Davey says.
The companies, based in Spokane, Colbert, and Hayden Lake, Idaho, respectively, have the potential to dominate their respective markets, Davey claims. Per their contracts, each concern will pay between 0.5 percent and 5 percent of their sales, depending on their profit margins, to either the SIRTI Foundation or a separate fund SIRTI uses to help companies. The companies won’t pay any other fee for services, he says.
“Every company we (incubate) needs to conserve any penny they generate,” Davey says.
RehabLogic Inc.
A group of Spokane psychologists founded RehabLogic Inc. three years ago and has developed computer software that tracks the rehabilitation progress of physical, speech, occupational, and other therapy patients, Davey says. The owners are Allen Bostwick, Paul Domitor, and Duane Green.
“There’s always a concern that maybe you’re not using the best technique to rehabilitate a patient,” Davey says. “They developed a ruler to measure patient success.”
As they work with patients, therapists enter data into the software, which has a central, Internet-based databank that’s hosted at SIRTI. The data is collected and feedback is provided to the therapist, the patient, and his or her doctor and family. It aims to help all of those parties see improvements in the patient’s abilities because “you can go a whole year and show no signs of the benefits of therapy” even when positive strides are being made, Davey says.
“You have lots of people involved in this and each has a stake in the software,” he says. “Determining what’s important to each one is how you sell it.”
For patients, RehabLogic also provides a disease-state management program that includes Internet chat rooms, industry news, exercises, and expert advice regarding recovery and prevention.
Davey says the product fits well in Spokane’s large health-care business sector.
“We’re seeing an increasing number of medical businesses approach us,” he says.
RehabLogic is based in Spokane at the SIRTI incubator in the Riverpoint Higher Education Park. It employs one person now, and Davey says it’s too soon to project how many people it could employ in the future.
DAS Electronics Inc.
DAS Electronics is a 3-year-old Colbert company that also leases space in the incubator, Davey says. Its main product, called BulletSensor, is a lightweight, wireless computer-based tool that provides instant feedback about rifle shooting accuracy. Small acoustic sensors are placed around a target and send messages back to rugged laptop computers, which Spokane-based Itronix Corp. donated to DAS Electronics, detecting the accuracy of a rifle’s bullet within a claimed 0.0005 of an inch.
Dave Saulibio, who owns the company and invented the product, designed it to be used in SWAT-team and military training programs.
“We just recently missed landing a ($250,000) contract with the Air Force,” Davey says.
The bullet-manufacturing industry also has shown an interest in BulletSensor because shooting accuracy depends, in part, on the quality of bullets, he says.
“Bullet makers are always looking for ways to show that their bullets are better than others,” Davey says.
The potential market for BulletSensor is “very large” and easily surpasses the minimum available market of $200 million in annual sales that SIRTI sets as a threshold before contracting with a company, he says. Once DAS Electronics is better established, it plans to improve the technology to detect the accuracy of low-velocity rounds, such as those shot with handguns. Currently, it only works when bullets travel very fast, such as those shot from rifles.
Saulibio has one full-time and three part-time employees. Davey says it’s also premature to project how many people that company could employ in the future, but says since it would be manufacturing products, it likely would need more workers than a software company like RehabLogic.
The WolfPac Group
The WolfPac Group, of Hayden Lake, makes high-quality, low-priced precision injection-molded parts. The 12-year-old company is SIRTI’s only new contractual customer that doesn’t lease space in the incubator.
The WolfPac Group, owned by Marv Honnell, currently manufactures one product for one client, so SIRTI is helping the company diversify its customer and product base to increase its sales and profit margins, Davey says.
“I call that kind of company a one-legged stool,” he says. “You can sit on a one-legged stool, but after a while it gets pretty uncomfortable.”
The WolfPac Group is close to landing a contract to manufacture a new product—a tool for dental hygienists developed outside the company—that could triple the company’s annual sales, Davey says. It also has developed a product of its own that could be used in the chemical industry, he says. Davey declines to provide further details about the products.
The WolfPac Group employs five people now, and could grow to about 10 next year, Davey says.
WolfPac and SIRTI are “talking now about at what point are we going to run out of manufacturing capacity” at the company, he says. “That’s a nice question to have to ask.”
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