Where are your labs located? Development/pilot/clinical material facilities? Commercial plants? If these do not exist, where should you build them? If outsourcing, where are your CDMO’s facilities located? Louis Garguilo interview with Kimball Hall at Abzena and Bill Bullock at North Carolina Biotechnology Center (NCBiotech) reveals the path to narrowing the decision-making process, pointing to the locations to focus on and the importance of choosing the right area for the companies to end up with the position that works best.

Extract:

‘How to Coordinate Your Site Selection With State Economic Development’

Some answers depend on even more elemental questions: Where would you like to live and work? Where might your future employees be concentrated, most easily recruited, and retained?

As they say: Location. Location. Economic Development.

Well, that’s what we should say.

Happy about it or otherwise, many readers will face a level of “site selection” – some of you coming face-to-face with economic development agencies at state, regional or local levels.

What should you expect? Fundamentally, economic development officials should have the capability to:

• guide from beginning to closure your decision-making for the selection of a greenfield or existing structure, or to expand a facility (maybe even at your CDMO)
• inform you on details such as whether utilities stop at the street or run-up to a site, there’s redundant energy sources, and a sufficient water supply
• provide data on items regarding airports, traffic, and weather
• navigate state/local taxes, financial and other incentive packages, and other agreements
• clarify workforce strengths/weaknesses, and provide entrée to training resources

The above and more should be provided via organised and efficient key point(s) of contact.

First Things First

Kimball Hall was an executive at Amgen and Genentech before becoming COO of CDMO Abzena. At all these positions she’s been directly involved in strategic, and ultimately successful, site locations.

Most recently, she was instrumental in the site selection project for Abzena, in North Carolina.

Click the download button below to read the complete version of ‘How to Coordinate Your Site Selection With State Economic Development‘ – Louis Garguilo’s interview with Kimball Hall at Abzena and Bill Bullock at North Carolina Biotechnology Center (NCBiotech)