Gates open for large corporations
Gateway Park's vice president for business development and general counsel D'Anne Hurd has serious ambitions for the development that has come to symbolize Worcester's rebirth.
As far as she's concerned, the location of the park and the science being done at Worcester Polytechnic Institute are all the convincing large, high-profile biotechnology companies like Genzyme, Biogen Idec and Thermo Fisher Scientific need to set up shop there.
But while those companies have visited Gateway Park, and have been impressed with the facilities there, both Genzyme and Biogen said that a move to Worcester wouldn't happen anytime in the near future.
Bo Piela, Genzyme's director of communications, said it's routine for the company "to explore and evaluate potential locations where we might at one point expand."
Henry Fitzgerald, the company's vice president of facilities operations said he was impressed by Gateway Park. "We had very positive impressions of the facility, the laboratories were first rate."
But Genzyme's operations are in Cambridge and Framingham. When the company expands it does so in those towns. The prospects of Genzyme moving any operations any closer to Worcester seem far off.
"If we were ever to go that far west," Fitzgerald said, "if our needs and the needs of the business park were ever to match, then we would consider that."
Likewise, a spokesman for Waltham-based Thermo Fisher said the company has no plans to expand or move from any of its current locations in the near future.
Open house
Even if those companies visit Gateway Park the same way someone who is not in the market for a home attends an open house, the hope is they'll come around to Gateway Park in the future, Hurd said.
For each company, Hurd has different reasons why Gateway Park would fit their needs perfectly.
And every time a high-profile company visits Gateway, it creates a marketing opportunity for the park.
Hurd said for Cambridge-based Biogen, the park's location is attractive. When the time comes for Biogen's in-house start-up companies to leave the nest, some will simply be absorbed into Biogen. Others will have to negotiate equity deals with the company and move out.
Hurd said Biogen doesn't consider Worcester too far afield for its spin-off companies, and Gateway offers the company an opportunity to save a money on rent and labor, too.
Hurd said Gateway could attract Genzyme with science.
"At the end of their second visit, they said they had no idea that the science coming out of WPI was so close to Genzyme," Hurd said.
And if the science being done at WPI is close to that being undertaken by Genzyme, then naturally, the students graduating from WPI would make good Genzyme employees, Hurd said. She said Genzyme particularly liked WPI's international project centers, and "project-based learning. Students are solving real-world problems," she said. "The students fit the mold they want."
If it turns out that those students are perfectly willing to move closer to Cambridge or Framingham, though, Hurd can still tell smaller protective tenants that the big guys have at least looked at space at Gateway Park.
"It's a great marketing opportunity," Hurd said. "We were talking to Invitrogen; when I told them we were talking to the large companies, they said those are the companies that they serve."
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