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James Oliver watched Engineering Animation Inc. grow from a start-up into a 400-plus-employee company amid the dot-com boom in the 1990s. He even left his professorship at Iowa State University to become EAI’s senior director of product development in 1997 until the dot-com bust of 2000, when the company was sold in a multimillion-dollar deal.

Now Oliver sees new opportunities for the large building EAI left mostly empty adjacent to the Iowa State University Research Park in Ames, and for ISU to play a role in creating a hotbed of new business growth in information technology.

“We all point to (EAI) still, and I think we can have a company like that every two or three years instead of every 10 years,” he said. “I would love to have a whole technology community in orbit of the university here.”

The vehicle to achieve this vision, Oliver believes, is ISU’s new CyberInnovation Institute, a collaboration among professors to turn research into new licensed technologies and start-ups. The institute was approved by the Iowa Board of Regents in May 2007 and received $1 million in state funding, with the goal of generating six new companies, three new industrial collaborations and a 40 percent jump in research funding.

This builds upon an ISU research program that has already created the technology foundation for 11 new companies, said Oliver, the institute’s director. The CyberInnovation Institute combines five IT-related research centers: the Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning and Discovery, the Information Assurance Center, the Information Infrastructure Institute, the NSF International Materials Institute and the Virtual Reality Applications Center.

Many of the professors will remain based in Howe Hall on the ISU campus, but can also use part of 17,250 square feet of office space called the Technical Collaboration Facility, which takes up about one-third of the former EAI building. The facility is a few miles from campus and is set up with several cubicles large enough for two or three employees designed for start-ups or collaborative efforts with other companies

“It’s the perfect incubator space,” said Stephen Gilbert, an ISU professor and founder of Clearsighted Inc., which is based in the new center. He believes the institute, once filled, will provide “a great networking opportunity” among many IT companies.

The collaboration is designed to increase the size and scope of research projects ISU can handle, make it more competitive for state and federal grants and help bridge the gap between research and economic development.

“We want to build that cohort or community of people with IT needs,” Oliver said, “whether research or personnel. … We have such great resources at ISU. My job is to break down those barriers and make connections here.”

So far, three start-ups have committed to space on the first floor at the Technical Collaboration Facility, and Doug Jacobson’s Internet-Scale Event and Attack Generation Environment (ISEAGE, pronounced “ice age”), an Internet simulator, has taken the entire second floor. Oliver expects to have commitments for the entire space by this summer, most likely involving partnerships with a couple of major corporations.

Starting the CyberInnovation Institute has been a two-year process that began in response to a Battelle Memorial Institute study that suggested information solutions as one of three key industries Iowa should focus on for economic development. Oliver said as a group of professors discussed how to support the report’s goals, they discovered that ISU had a lot of strengths that spanned a wide variety of IT issues, but that its existing IT research centers weren’t working together or engaging the business community as much as they could.

“Information technology is first of all broad in its applications,” Oliver said, “It’s really the engine underneath all research we do at the university.”

The $1 million in funding from the state is designed to get the institute off the ground, with sponsored research, grants and endowment funding sustaining it long term. Professors already have submitted several proposals to receive funding from the National Science Foundation, which Oliver said is focused on supporting IT research over the next few years.

Oliver also believes that if the institute proves successful at generating IT businesses, it could begin to attract venture capital. “We don’t really have that here in Iowa,” he said, “but there is plenty of angel investment and opportunities to develop that kind of culture of venture-funded entities.”

The Iowa State University Pappajohn Center for Entrepreneurship, which funds student internships with new ventures, is working with the CyberInnovation Institute. This relationship not only would help start-ups gain needed staff support, but also could encourage more young people to stay in Iowa after they graduate, Oliver said. Gilbert has already utilized this resource for his start-up.

So far, Clearsighted is the only company up and running in the first-floor cubicle space at the Technical Collaboration Facility. Gilbert’s company is focused on developing a program that trains people to use software more effectively than watching a video. It is funded by a $700,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, and through an agreement with Carnegie Learning Inc., Gilbert has access to its Intelligent Tutoring System to develop his own adult training tool. The method Clearsighted is working on gives people a task to do in the program they are learning; if the users make a mistake, pop-ups will tell them what to do, or they can click on a hint box if stuck. Gilbert hopes to license the program to training companies.

Jacobson’s ISEAGE project was the first to move into the facility in time for May’s High School Cyber-Defense Competition, where teams of students try to stop “the hackers” from attacking the Internet simulator. However, Jacobson sees many more opportunities, including allowing corporations to use the center to test new security products in a controlled environment. He also is entertaining the idea of developing “ice cubes,” miniature versions of ISEAGE that companies would have at their locations and could connect to the main ISEAGE.

The CyberInnovation Institute, he said, “has given [ISEAGE] a nice high-profile space. We were kind of cramped where we were before.”

ISEAGE began with a $2 million grant from the state to look at what would happen to Iowa’s cyber network if, for example, a natural disaster took out one of its portals. After about four years of research, Jacobson expects to release the results this summer, which he believes will help showcase what the center can do for businesses. Most of this is not new to Jacobson, who in 1996 started Palisade Systems, a company that leverages commercial development rights to patented technology Jacobson develops through his security research.

Oliver is in the process of setting up operations for Visual Medical Solutions LLC, a company he founded with ISU professor Eliot Winer and Blank Children’s Hospital pediatric surgeon Thom Lobe. The partners are waiting for approval from the Food and Drug Administration to begin selling a technology that allows doctors to create a three-dimensional image of an X-rayed area, which can help them better visualize an upcoming surgery. The company has rented a cubicle space next to Clearsighted.

Conure, a custom animation company, also is in the new facility.

The concept of the CyberInnovation Institute is similar to efforts at a few other schools, such as Purdue University’s Discovery Park, but Oliver said ISU’s venture is more focused on industry collaboration rather than just research. Oliver said he has met with several companies to explain how they can utilize the institute, including a meeting with Wells Fargo & Co. officials in August.

Oliver believes seeing their work go beyond just research will energize professors. “It’s what gets me passionate about coming to work,” he said, “doing work that really has an impact on more than just my resume.”