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Technology park offers job opportunities

Courtney Day, Campus Editor

A $3.5 million site development grant from the Ohio Department of Development (ODOD) was announced this summer, marking a turning point in the Miami Heritage Technology Park (MHTP) project.

The technology park is something Miami University alumnus and MHTP director Todd Dockum has been working on for six years.

"The vision of the technology park is primarily centered on working with Miami to commercialize the intellectual property at Miami," Dockum said.

Dockum said student engagement is one of the pillars of the project. He hopes to see students working on internships and helping with research. He envisions cross-departmental research and business opportunities.

"The possibilities are really endless," Dockum said.

First-year Kaitlin Pizzimenti said she thinks research and internship experience is important.

"College is preparing us to get out there, so to have that opportunity would be a great idea," she said.

Pizzimenti said she knows upperclassmen who have been offered jobs after having these types of real world opportunities during college.

Dockum comes from a Miami family. His grandparents, mother, aunts and uncles all went to Miami and Todd received his MBA from Miami in 1988. The MHTP site has been in the family since 1951. His mother, who currently owns the land, is contributing the farm to the project.

"It's very much an entire family project," Dockum said. "I think that's one of the reasons we've been so successful."

But the success did not come easy. According to Kyger, Oxford Community Improvement Corporation (OCIC) applied in conjunction with the MHTP in 2008 in hopes of winning funding from the ODOD. They ranked 15 of 57 proposed projects in that award cycle, but only the top 13 projects were awarded funding.

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After reapplying in 2010, the MHTP project was ranked highest of all the projects submitted.

OCIC Executive Director Alan Kyger said the grant money will provide funding to make the land, a farm just outside the City of Oxford on Route 73, useable for the first building in the park. The OCIC hopes the first building will house a data storage business that will serve as an anchor tenant and provide data storage for the potential research tenants in the future.

According to Kyger, the grant money will help build a road and bring in utilities, a sanitation system and a fiber optic line for high-speed data. He said it will also offset the cost of the first building as incentive for the first business to locate to the park.

Now that the project has grant money behind it, Dockum said businesses are taking the technology park more seriously.

Dockum said he is now in the process of talking to potential data center operators about locating to MHTP.

He said he hopes to break ground on the technology park in the next 12 months. As a condition of the grant, the first building must be built within three years. Dockum said he thinks bringing in more research tenants and creating more infrastructure for a fully functioning technology park will take 20 to 25 years.

The MHTP has committed to achieving platinum LEED certification. Dockum said he believes the environmentally friendly strategy will not only reduce the carbon footprint of the park, but also reduce the operating costs.

Dockum said he hopes the park will eventually reach a level where it will retain students in the Oxford area for jobs after graduation.

Kyger said the City of Oxford hopes the park will create more professional jobs in the Oxford area for Oxford residents and spouses of Miami staff and faculty.

"We would like to try to recapture as much of that population as we can," Kyger said of Miami faculty and staff who choose to live outside the Oxford area.