Norman Apsley describes the Northern Ireland Science Park. CLICK HERE for more about the buildings at the park. CLICK HERE for more on the idea behind starting the business incubator.

Northern Ireland’s high-tech business center is encouraging the province’s best and brightest to stay at home, but the technologies being developed there are being exported all over the world, including Atlanta.

The Northern Ireland Science Park provides office space for existing technology companies and runs programs encouraging entrepreneurs to form companies in Northern Ireland rather than leaving, as many Irish have done over the years.

GlobalAtlanta toured the park during a trip to Belfast, the province’s capital, to examine business and tourism initiatives there and how they might affect Georgia.

After a series of trade missions between the state and Northern Ireland, Consilium Technologies Group of Antrim, Northern Ireland, set up a team in the science park to develop software for mobile devices like PDAs and laptops.  Georgia Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle announced June 25 that the state is buying the resulting products for its employees.

Local startups are prominent in the complex, but large corporations like Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. have offices there, and New York’s Citigroup Inc. occupies an entire building.

The science park was one of the first stops during a May investment conference aimed at attracting more U.S. businesses to Northern Ireland.

Norman Apsley, the park’s CEO, said that space is at a premium and companies are lining up for offices in three new buildings, the first opening this fall.

“If everyone negotiating for that building signs up, we’ll be starting another one straight away,” he said.  “So if anyone from Atlanta wants to come, they have to speak quickly.”

Mr. Apsley said that the science park was at full occupancy when it opened in 2006, defying critics who scoffed at the idea of opening a high-tech business center in Belfast’s derelict shipyards.

The park is now the first corporate space open in the Titanic Quarter, the former shipbuilding area of Belfast, which is under redevelopment to provide home, office and retail space.

“Everyone thought we were mad doing the science park down there,” said Michael Graham, a former science park employee, now director of corporate real estate for the Titanic Quarter.

“I arrived to live in a port-a-cabin for a year, until the Innovation Centre was built,” he added, referring to the park’s first building.

Startup companies without the capital to rent office space can become associates of the science park and set up a virtual office there while doing most of their work from home.

The park’s services, apart from space and the proximity of professionals in similar industries, include pro bono help from more than 500 Belfast lawyers and accountants and a business mentorship program with local professionals.

The park runs an annual contest, in partnership with Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Ulster, in which groups of young entrepreneurs pit business plans for potential companies against one another for prize money.

The plans are critiqued by Belfast businesspeople for viability and innovation.  The overall winner receives 10,000 British pounds, nearly $20,000, to implement their vision.  Winners in four categories—bio-tech, high-tech, clean tech, and digital media—receive 2,000 pounds each, and a select university undergraduate gets 1,000 pounds.

Science park officials hope to attract tourists as well as businesses, as the complex sits on the Belfast dock where famous ocean liner Titanic and her sister ships Olympic and Britannic were built nearly 100 years ago.

The dock where the ships were launched in 1912 sits in the back of the Innovation Centre, and Mr. Apsley said in those days it would have been fitted with the latest technology for moving the massive ships.

He added that the local development of technology that made Belfast a shipbuilding center in the 19th century drives some of the park’s leaders to make the city an innovation hub again.

“The progressive 19th century in Belfast has become something of a model and a wish for us,” Mr. Apsley said.  “If we can be as progressive in the 21st century as in the 19th, we’ll take the world by storm.”

Plans are underway to renovate the pump house that powered the docking equipment, also behind the Innovation Centre, into a joint tourist venue, coffee shop and common area for park businesspeople.

Mr. Apsley hopes the building will be ready to host the first Entrepreneur’s Ball in September, at the end of this year’s business plan contest.