Mark Conner and Hardware Park Have Designs on a Medtech Economy
Before he became executive director of Hardware Park, a Birmingham hub for high-tech start-up companies, Mark Conner (LB ’24) spent 26 years as a classroom teacher. As it turns out, both careers contribute to economic development, he says.
Education is crucial for inspiring and preparing innovative thinkers and future business leaders, says Conner, co-chair of Leadership Birmingham’s recent Economic Development Day. “Investing in students has economic benefits for our state.”
After earning several engineering degrees, Conner taught science and engineering at Homewood and Hoover high schools. He also founded and directed Hoover High’s Engineering Academy, created the online Catapult Engineering Academy for students nationwide, and taught undergraduates in UAB’s School of Engineering. That extensive education background is a good match for Hardware Park, a nonprofit center in the Smithfield neighborhood specializing in the development of novel physical devices—and a new generation of tech designers and builders. Conner, involved with Hardware Park since its 2017 founding, became executive director in 2022.
Hardware Park fills a gap in the region’s innovation ecosystem. While Birmingham’s medical and research community has pioneered digital, bioscience, and pharmaceutical innovations, “we didn’t see much happening in the medtech [medical technology] device lane,” Conner explains. Medtech encompasses Food and Drug Administration-regulated devices along with assistive technologies—“anything that would improve quality of life or anything that could be lifesaving,” he says. (Current projects for Hardware Park industrial designers and engineers include a surgical instrument and a sensor for boat docks that could prevent electric-shock drowning.) Hardware Park helps early-stage entrepreneurs leap initial barriers in bringing their ideas to market by working with them to refine concepts and develop prototypes.
That help comes, in part, from college students majoring in engineering, industrial design, or entrepreneurship who are selected for Hardware Park’s internship. The part-time program, supported by an Innovate Alabama grant, tasks students with serving as the design team for a cutting-edge product. So far, Conner says, students have collaborated with two early-stage Hardware Park start-ups and one established firm on new medtech devices. The fall cohort consisted of UAB students; last summer’s group also included students from Auburn and Tuskegee.
For students, Hardware Park offers practical experience working alongside creative, inventive people to bring something new to life. That inevitably includes exposure to the “fuzzy, messy” realities of business and manufacturing, from navigating team dynamics to reconfiguring production timelines when delivery of a crucial component is delayed, Conner says. Most important, many students come from academic environments where “they think ‘failure’ is a bad word,” he says. But “in the design world, if you’re not failing, you’re probably doing it wrong. We want [Hardware Park] to be a safe place for them to try something that doesn’t work and then learn from that and grow.”
Conner is pleased with the students’ output, and his long-term vision is to transform the internship into a co-op program in which students assist Hardware Park companies full time for three semesters during their final two years of college. Once again, the blending of students and entrepreneurs would benefit both, he says. “[We could] take early-stage concepts from founders and carry those out through the context of the co-op . . . to help these companies get to a point where [founders] can talk to investors and have something to show.”
Training Alabama students and connecting them with Alabama employers positively impacts medtech growth, workforce development, and the state’s economy as a whole, Conner says. And the new products coming to market promise to change countless lives for the better.
“There are lots of good ideas that haven’t been tapped yet. [And we want to] encourage people to take the risk,” Conner says. “Don’t stop with just the idea.”
This article was originally posted in the Leadership Birmingham Winter 24/25 magazine. See the full magazine here.