REDI in Retrospect: Sternbach on 'What Makes Rockville Special'

Editor’s Note: This is the first part of a six-part look at Rockville Economic Development, Inc. during the tenure of former executive director Sally Sternbach. Before her departure, Rockville Patch sat down for an interview with Sternbach and associate director Lynne Benzion, who took over as REDI’s acting executive director this month.

Two construction cranes loom over Rockville Town Center, not far from the Rockville Economic Development, Inc. office on Monroe Street.

One, next to the county’s Executive Office Building, is building the county’s . The other, at the corner of Rockville Pike and East Middle Lane, next to where Sally Sternbach began her new job this week as deputy director of the county’s Department of Economic Development, is building the new .

The pending move of the hotel chain from Silver Spring to Rockville is an example of what Sternbach calls the “traditional economic development work” that she led in nine years at the helm of , the nonprofit, public-private economic development arm of the City of Rockville.

While REDI had a role in luring Choice Hotels to Town Center, much of Sternbach's time has been spent trying to foster the development of an industry that is more innovation than tradition. REDI’s website dubs Rockville “Home of the Genome."

In economic development “you sort of take a look at what your very special assets are and you look at what your population demographics are,” Sternbach said. What you find in Rockville is a highly-educated, international workforce surrounded by federal laboratories, she said.

“This should be our economic development gold mine,” Sternbach said. “We should be the entrepreneurial hot spot for all of the life sciences segment, certainly in this region, if not on the East Coast.”

The Bayh-Dole Act, passed in 1980, made it easier for discoveries made through federally funded research to be commercialized.

“Everybody with an entrepreneurial streak gave it a run in those days,” Sternbach said.

In the ensuing decades, scientists from the and other federal labs struck out on their own, forming life sciences companies like and other, smaller companies.

With the foundation of Rockville’s life sciences sector in place, what the city needed was "an infrastructure here for taking the really young companies and taking the intellectual property that was coming out of these laboratories and helping them to form companies around it and getting them through the really early stage," Sternbach said.

Opened June 12, 2007, the downtown Rockville incubator was born out of that need. REDI raised the initial $1 million to outfit the incubator before turning it over to the county’s economic development department to manage as part of a countywide system.

Shortly thereafter, REDI launched another initiative focused on fostering the biotechnology industry. INNoVATE is a National Science Foundation program now in its third year in Rockville. The partnership between REDI, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Johns Hopkins University, trains post doctoral fellows and research scientists in how to start technology-based companies.

“All of this has been driven by that basic analysis of what makes us special,” Sternbach said.

Tomorrow: Fostering entrepreneurs.