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College Station, Texas may be the home of Texas A&M University and its world class Aggies,
but it's also home to a world-class, small business, called Lynntech.
The firm was founded in the late 1980s and opened its doors for business a few years later with President Oliver Murphy at the helm.
Murphy had left the university environment with ideas and concepts he wanted to commercialize,
but the big question was how to fund the work. He found a way.
We decided to investigate the SBIR and see how appropriate or useful it would be for our technology development activities.
Today, Lynntech has a diversified line of innovations and products, and many begin in the same area of research.
The company's efforts are in two key areas: fuel sources and homeland defense, and this focused strategy has always worked in their favor.
Very often with a core breakthrough technology you can apply that to a lot of different problems in the real world.
Involvement with the Small Business Innovation Research program continues today.
Lynntech is developing a fuel cell for a NASA flight project, called Helios, an unmanned aerial vehicle
that will lay the groundwork for future Mars aircraft designs and missions, as well as various atmospheric studies.
The company has been involved in fuel cell technology for sometime, and the NASA work
is just another example of how they manage to apply core expertise to a different area.
Lynntech is very successful at incubating and transferring their R & D technologies to the commercial marketplace.
Murphy believes it's because of their approach.
Once we have passed the deliverable stage of making a deliverable to a government agency, we then identify by going to tradeshows
and by other means of contacting potential customers. What is it that they want in a product base on our technology.
And, to maintain their strong technology transfer reputation, the company spends a lot of
time cultivating relationships with big players, who are in search of new technologies.
It's a key part of our success story if you like. Forging interactions with large corporations, finding out what the
marketplace needs really are as opposed to what we inventors perceive the market place to be.
Murphy knows when one of Lynntech's products is a hit because it measures up to his two key standards.
A true success in developing technology is to get a product that somebody is willing to pay money for and
the secondly they are willing to come back and buy a repeat item.
Lynntech has become a world leader in taking a technology through research and development stages and out into the market.
With new applications constantly on the horizon, they'll continue to develop products for a commercial market.
For Oliver Murphy, it's about pride.
It's a fantastic reward obviously putting in seven, eight, nine or ten years of research development, product development
into some of these areas and to see that come to fruition as a real product that you know started with your team of people.