Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

BizTUCSONOctober 21, 2025

5 minutes read

Cementing the Region’s Tech-Building Environment

By Jay Gonzales

To build a coveted high-tech economy with the accompanying high-paying jobs in a region, there has to be a starting point for businesses.

Over the last dozen years or so, the pieces of an entrepreneurial ecosystem have come together in Southern Arizona, giving budding entrepreneurs a chance to be a part of the foundation for the local economy.

There remain gaps – venture capital being the most obvious – but between the University of Arizona’s extensive efforts to advance research to market, and a number of incubators and organizations aimed at supporting startups, entrepreneurs have local options to help get their businesses off the ground.

“An (entrepreneurial) ecosystem is all of the organizations − workforce, talent, government institutions, entrepreneurial leaders themselves − that support an entrepreneur as they launch or grow their company,” said Liz Pocock, CEO of Startup Tucson, an organization whose sole purpose is to help companies get off the ground.

“Startup Tucson has been an ecosystem organizer since 2012 when we were founded, she said. “There were some of the more traditional small business support services like SBDC (Small Business Development Center) and SCORE and the Women’s Business Center that were really to support brick and mortar. But there wasn’t a ton in the community to support people that were trying to build startups or thinking about things from more of an entrepreneurial mindset.”

There is now.

The UA started Tech Launch Arizona in 2012 to get campus inventors through the process of commercializing their research from licensing to patents and connecting with venture capital.

Tech Parks Arizona gives new and existing businesses a place to set up their businesses in a research park environment conducive to fostering innovation.

“If you look at almost any large entrepreneurial ecosystem, anywhere in the country, there’s a university at the center of it, a big research university, and that provides the anchor for what we’re doing,” said Douglas Hockstad, UA associate VP and head of Tech Launch Arizona.

But it needs more than just the existence of a research university in a region to anchor innovation and the ability to get research to market, Hockstad said. It needs a commitment that eventually came in the form of Tech Launch Arizona.

“There wasn’t a focus on it. There weren’t resources dedicated to it. And therefore, it didn’t happen,” Hockstad said of the limited campus technology transfer efforts prior to 2012. “The senior leadership at the university made a decision this was going to be important. We’re going to put resources into it, and we’re going to see things happen, not next year, not the year after, but over a long period of time. And that’s what’s happened.”

The UA’s Center for Innovation is an incubator operating within Tech Parks Arizona that zeroes in on technology and science startups to find the resources needed to get their technology off the ground to become scalable startup ventures with capital, potential partners, advisors and other resources all with an eye toward keeping them in the region.

“At the core of what we truly offer is a programmatic piece,” said Casey Carrillo, executive director of the Center for Innovation. “We have a program that works on taking whatever the company is working on − whether that’s a specific technology, a product, a service to the market − to really focus on the commercialization piece and on the business development side.

“We work with them to identify customers and work to have them be successful here in Tucson or statewide. We really focus on the business side of allowing them to scale and grow within our region.”

In addition to the work Startup Tucson does to support new businesses, it created the annual week-long TENWEST Festival where attendees can rub elbows with experienced businesspeople to get in on the latest trends in technology and entrepreneurship.

Social Venture Partners Tucson pulls together philanthropy and entrepreneurs with its annual Fast Pitch Tucson event where up-and-coming nonprofits can make live pitches to donors in attendance for funding for their ventures.

The list of entities helping entrepreneurs goes on, and there’s necessary collaboration to make it all work together, said Karla B. Morales, VP of the Arizona Technology Council in Southern Arizona. She also serves as board treasurer of the Campus Research Corporation, the nonprofit entity that operates the UA Tech Parks.

“What we add to the entire state as far as the tech sector and economic development is concerned is we create the platform for the collaboration and partnership between businesses, higher education and government entities that really strengthen entrepreneurship,” Morales said of the Arizona Tech Council.

“We consider ourselves the hub that brings together all of these amazing partners in the ecosystem and sets the platform to make sure that those conversations happen, that we don’t reinvent the wheel, that we create systems of collaboration that create a community support system in each one of these incubators and accelerators.”

As an example, Morales is quick to mention a new entity formed at Pima Community College to support aspiring entrepreneurs in information technology, applied technology and manufacturing. The Southern Arizona Technology & Entrepreneurship Center – or SATEC – opened last December within PCC’s Small Business Development Center.

“SATEC was designed to be the region’s destination for entrepreneurs, whether they are students, faculty or members of the business community,” SATEC manager Lydia Kennedy said in a news release announcing its formation. “It’s a place for hands-on experiences, collaborations and connections that spark real business growth.”

Still, the biggest connection that needs to be made to help all these new businesses get off the ground, and to help get all this research to market, is money.

When it comes to venture capital, Tucson and Southern Arizona don’t approach the availability of financial resources in tech hubs like Silicon Valley, Boston, Denver, even Phoenix, said Fletcher McCusker, who started a venture capital firm in Tucson.

McCusker, well known in the region for spearheading the redevelopment of downtown Tucson through Rio Nuevo, said there’s momentum, but there’s a long way to go when it comes to having abundant funding for startups.

His firm, UA Venture Capital, began investing primarily in UA-developed technologies in 2018, and has invested about $40 million in 14 companies. Those investments have created $400 million in exits, he said. The firm still owns six of the companies in which it invested.

McCusker said he recognized an opportunity for establishing a venture capital firm by observing the research that was being done at the UA, knowing that some of that was marketable and ultimately worth taking a risk.

“When we launched our company here, people discouraged us from doing that because it’s not a financial center,” McCusker said. “They said no one’s going to know you guys, and we proved them wrong.

“Most of our interest in-state was meeting the UA research faculty. Some of these men and women have been researching their specialties for 25-30 years, and they’ve been doing it with grants. But when the grant money runs out, the product gets shelved.”

Those products are increasingly making it into the market through Tech Launch Arizona, UA Venture Capital and all the other firms and organizations working to build and support an entrepreneurial ecosystem in the region.

“We’re some sort of technology hub, some sort of spark that is attracting young people and entrepreneurial businesses and big businesses that want to be around that talent,” McCusker said. “Historically, we just waited for the phone to ring. But I do think there’s an effort now to really rethink the whole region.”