TEDCO funds Makerspaces for entrepreneurial growth

TEDCO PROGRAM SPOTLIGHT

By Justin Ferguson, Innovation Manager, TEDCO Venture Development
Source: I95Business

Optical and photonics equipment. Incubators, a PCR machine, a nanodrop spectrophotometer, and six workstations.

That is not an inventory of a university physics department and a pharmaceutical lab. It is a description of two makerspaces TEDCO funded in the 2026 award cycle of the Maryland Makerspace Initiative Program, in Prince George's County and Frederick County, both open to the public.

Ten years ago, a list of what a makerspace held would have run to wood, metal, a laser cutter, and a 3D printer. The word making has stretched since then. It now covers photonics and molecular biology, and the ceiling on what a community space can attempt moved with it..

Two counties, two frontiers

In Frederick County, TEDCO funded CELLS BioMakerSpace, the county's first community biotechnology lab, housed inside FITCI, Frederick's first and only business incubator. 

"Frederick County has always found a way to make big ideas usable — CELLS BioMakerSpace is the latest example," said Frederick County Executive Jessica Fitzwater. "By putting a community biotech lab inside FITCI, we're giving residents a genuine on-ramp into a field that's shaping our region's future."

In Prince George's County, TEDCO funded the Quantum Makerspace, a project of Frontier Technology Institute anchored at the University of Maryland's Quantum Startup Foundry in College Park. It is still in development.

Each sits inside an institution that already convenes its field, which is part of why the equipment is usable rather than decorative. Someone has to be there who knows how to run it.

Where the pipeline into biotech has historically run through graduate programs, the intent here is to open a second one that runs through the general population.

Think of it as adding roads to a highway. The roads already available led to destinations that existed on the public map: the trades, the arts, general fabrication, prototyping a product. What is new is that a road now runs toward quantum, and another toward molecular biology. Those were not on the map at all. You may keep going straight. But the road being changes what is reachable.

Why the frontier bet was easy

There was very little internal debate about whether a program built on making should fund optical tables and photon detectors. Making has diversified. You can make things in nearly any niche now, and the definition stopped being about wood and 3D printers a long time ago.

Maryland has named its lighthouse sectors. Quantum is one of them. If the state intends to capitalize on those assets, then stitching the ecosystem together inside those specific niches is not a departure from the mission. It is the mission, applied where the state has already declared it is going.

The value proposition is not that you can come to Maryland and make a wide range of items. It is that you can make different things in different places in ways particular to what that place already is. In the biotech corridor, you can now make inside that field.

Breadth in the same geography

The same program, in the same two counties, also funds the Brunswick Arts Council in Frederick alongside Inncuvate in Prince George's, which has now won in consecutive cycles.

That is partly a function of who applied. But a high concentration of one thing does not mean a lesser amount of another. Prince George's has a large creative population. Frederick is more than biotech. You do not want a system where people have to travel to a designated county for a designated capability.

Capability has to grow from local demand, not from a catalog. The returns are not linear, and the ceiling is set by what a community actually needs.

Most of these spaces once ran on volunteers and whatever equipment they could assemble. The difference now is scale and stability: better equipment, staffed hours, and spaces connected to each other instead of operating in isolation.

Which matters because some things cannot be learned at a distance. There is a category of knowledge you only get by handling the physical system, whether that system is an optical bench, a bioreactor, or a lathe.

The door has to be a real door. Someone has to be able to walk through it.