Industry Partners
A major part of the ATDC is the Ford Student Design Center, named to recognize the building’s lead donor: the Ford Motor Company Fund.
The center aligns the interests of Ford—and its future engineering workforce—with our students. The company values employees who are creative leaders and who display entrepreneurial skills. Imbuing our students with these traits will help the company manage change, adopt new technology, continually improve products, and remain competitive in the marketplace.
The Ford Student Design Center will provide space for both senior design and Enterprise. These two programs give Michigan Tech students the opportunity for undergraduate research that is relevant to industry. Senior design and Enterprise are run as companies, and participating students partner with business or industry to tackle engineering and business challenges.
Teams of students learn to conceptualize, analyze, plan, design, develop, produce, and market—all within the constraints of the business world: deadlines, budgets, and performance. They also learn a key ingredient of our educational and research programs—collaboration among students, faculty, staff, business, and industry.
Undergraduate design, development, and research are critical elements of a Michigan Tech education, and they put the University in the forefront of higher education in the nation. The ATDC will help give students at Tech an excellent, practical education grounded in the latest concepts and technologies.
More than 30 percent of Tech’s invention disclosures includes students. In fact, Michigan Tech leads the state in the number of disclosures per dollar of research. The ATDC will provide space for some of these students and their collaborators to convert their innovations into businesses and economic development. |
Nuts and Bolts
Essentially, the ATDC serves as a testing and prototyping facility.
It provides 27,500 square feet of space for high-tech business starts-ups, prototyping, research, testing laboratories for the Keweenaw Research Center and the Michigan Department of Community Health, conference space, and business support services offered through MTU’s Corporate Services and the Michigan Tech EnterPrise SmartZone. It also houses the Ford Student Design Center.
The Keweenaw Research Center, one of many research arms of Michigan Tech, will operate a full chassis dynamometer laboratory here, as well as manage the complex. Unique among universities, the ATDC will have both a chassis dynamometer and an acoustic chamber. In addition, a high-ventilation room accommodates safe testing of running engines and chemical experiments. The exhaust system was funded by the Michigan Economic Development Corp.
The ATDC will provide high-tech, high-bay space for innovation, as well as support services, such as the most advanced, high-speed Internet in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. ATDC business incubator space is affiliated with, and complements, the other incubators of the SmartZone.
Corporate Services will act as a portal for ATDC tenants and the business community to find and link with expert Michigan Tech faculty, staff, and talented student teams as they pursue high-tech business development.
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