Beta-Rubicon Walks the Walk

Corporate and bureaucratic lip service is being paid to the need to grow more knowledge-based industries in Arkansas. One company in particular is doing more than just “talking the talk.”

Beta-Rubicon Inc, an independent technology assessment firm in Fayetteville, is already growing knowlege-based businesses that have high potential in Arkansas.

Virtual Incubator Corp., which provides management support for budding companies, spun off from Beta-Rubicon and helped create The Alpha Fund — an early seed-stage funding mechanism for startups.

And Beta-Rubicon is also importing technology-oriented business into the state. Its work with biomedical foundations and high-tech centers in Louisiana and Oklahoma, and teaming agreements with MCR Federal Inc. and BearingPoint, both of McClean, Va., have brought both revenue and expertise to Arkansas.

MCR is an AT&T company that’s a service provider for various departments within the United States government. BearingPoint is a business systems integrator.

Beta-Rubicon even landed a $3.5 million contract with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in conjunction with work for BearingPoint.

The NIST Advanced Technology Program contract was a first for Arkansas and a feather in our collective pocket protector. Another coup, winning the nationwide underwriting business for AVRA Financial, will place the words “Beta-Rubicon” and “Arkansas” in the ears of thousands of developing startups from Broadway to Sand Hill Road.

Beta-Rubicon, which is also beginning an effort to secure additional capital in order to expand its marketing efforts, even helped organize and supported two local investor/entrepreneur forums.

If everyone touting the need for knowledge-based business in Arkansas was as proactive as Beta-Rubicon, we could actually wind up with this sort of scenario:

Ideas are born at University of Arkansas labs. VIC assists in the formation and startup of companies based on the resulting embryonic technologies. The Alpha Fund provides very early stage money to complement federal research dollars. The still early stage firms become candidates for Arkansas Ventures funding and perhaps lease space at the Genesis Technology Incubator in Fayetteville.

Then the companies become candidates for Diamond State Ventures, possibly relocating at the Arkansas Research and Technology Park to come full circle by hiring significant numbers of UA graduates to spawn new ideas.