How on earth do you ever assess the value of strangely constituted organizations like TEC Edmonton, the $6 million a year “incubator” of new technology-based business that’s an “unincorporated joint venture” between the University of Alberta – taking on all the university’s invention-to-industry processes – and Edmonton Economic Development Corporation.

It has 40 employees, takes up a whole floor of Enterprise Square, and other than counting the immediate number of successful companies it spawns, there’s no real way of measuring its success.

Here’s how.

Look at a technology-sector in this town, from inception to today, and decide if that sector could ever have succeeded without the occasional helping hand of “incubators” like what were essentially TEC Edmonton’s predecessors.

In 1982, the federal government chose the University of Alberta to be a centre of excellence for “microsystems,” which found expression in the Alberta Microelectronics Centre AMC.

Which, with an injection of funds from the provincial government and technology from LSI Logic, became AMC Research Centre in 1986.

AMC then started manufacturing circuit boards and micro-chips.

AMC remained a semi-creature of government until 1998, but it was getting better at what it did.

In 1998, AMC was fully privatized into two companies – the thriving Micralyne for specialty micro-chip manufacture, and AMC Corporation which specialized in circuit boards and was recently merged with a Calgary company.

Three companies have been spun off from Micralyne – Big Bang Width, Scanometrics and in 2002, Norcada.

By spin-off, we usually mean somebody left the parent company to go do their own thing.

Meanwhile, Sherritt and the provincial government started Westaim in 1994, basically to find commercial applications for Sherritt’s micro-coating technology. Westaim eventually faltered, but along the way spun off Thermic Edge, Surface Engineered Products and Nucryst. And from Nucryst evolved Exciton.

Thermic Edge is now gone, but some of its technology and its building was taken over by Micralyne.

So Westaim may have crashed and burned, but its Edmonton descendants are earning $70 to $80 million a year with about 120 employees.

AMC also created the foundation – the expertise – that helped the U of A win the federally funded NINT, National Institute for Nanotechnology. NINT unto itself is a huge technology win for the city – with $20 million or more a year coming in to it for nano-research, and its reputation growing year by year, and more and more commercial applications coming out of its ground-breaking research.

In 2007, the province funded ACAMP, the Alberta Centre for Advanced Microsystem Products, which now works with some 45 microsystem companies, helping them develop their products.

You get the picture?

It’s not about the now – it’s about the technologies, the people, that grow and merge and find products and open up manufacturing plants. That somehow, down the line, we end up with 50 to 60 small companies that all can trace their lineage back to the original provincial and federal investment in the Alberta Microelectronics Centre.