Our fourth and newly renovated high-tech facility sits on the waterfront of the Portage Canal providing available boat parking directly adjacent to the building. This is now MTEC SmartZone’s flagship facility which boasts 17,000 square feet of office and lab space. The Lakeshore Center is yet another excellent of the community’s reuse of an abandoned building.

Located adjacent to the beautiful Portage Canal and the world’s heaviest lift bridge, the Powerhouse was the SmartZone’s first incubator that came on line after an $800K renovation in June 2003. The completion of the second expansion/renovation project in January 2008 totaling $1.0 million increased the available office space to approximately 15,000 sq feet. This is an excellent example of a historic building that was abandoned and was restored for reuse. It has significant history being the first power station in the Upper Peninsula, providing electric power for the cities of Houghton and Hancock. In 1890 this power station started generating 5.4 megawatts into the community and continued creating electricity for 69 years.

The building layout is designed for either multi-tenant or single tenant occupancy. It supports three floors of office space with a fourth floor dedicated as a high tech lab with high-current four-phase power. The entire building is wired with CAT6 wiring which is supported by fiber optic hubs, one on each of the four floors, leading to the main building servers in its separately monitored and controlled climate controlled server room. It has complete IT infrastructure with multiple choices for services: fax, copy center, central mail room, VoIP phone system, traditional phone system, cable, T-1, DSL, and a 50Mbps microwave link to the Gigabit Internet access. This facility also has a dedicated 180kW backup generator providing 24x7 power.

The Jutila Center also houses the Entrepreneur Support Center is a place where entrepreneurs and small businesses can go to access office space, equipment, training and other start-up resources.

The program also offers product and service businesses entrepreneurial training in every aspect, from business planning and research, to finance, marketing and product development. This center is unique in that it provides entrepreneurs with a short-term office as well as professional guidance to launch the business they are starting

Located in the hardwoods, next to Michigan Tech’s football stadium, is another incubator. This new facility came on line on August 2008. It supports 27,000 square feet of high-bay space and traditional office space layouts for innovation, as well as support services, 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.

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 students at Michigan Tech. 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.

There is a full chassis dynamometer laboratory here, as well as small engine and large engine dynamometers. 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. ATDC business incubator space is owned and operated by Michigan Tech and is affiliated with, and complements, the other incubators of the SmartZone.