Interview with Simon Nynens, CEO of the NJ Innovation Institute
Simon Nynens is currently the CEO of the New Jersey Innovation Institute, an NJIT corporation that is focused on promoting and supporting innovation in New Jersey. Nynens was formerly the VP of Business Operations at NJIT, and prior to that was the CEO of Wayside Technology, a publicly traded company, for over 10 years.
Can you share your background with us, and how you ended up at Wayside Technology?
Sure! So out of school, I studied accountancy, and then I went to work for Ernst and Young in Amsterdam. And at Ernst and Young, as a CPA, you get sent to many different clients, and then I moved over from the yearly audit group to what they called corporate, and what that was was mostly handling deals, corporate finance, so I was assisting companies who were buying other companies. One of those companies was that company [Wayside Technology], and I joined that company and basically worked my way up. I started working in Paris and then came over to the US to become Worldwide Controller and then basically worked myself up from the finance side to the operational side and ultimately in 2006, I became CEO.
What was your experience like at Wayside Technology? What were your roles throughout the years?
I started as European Controller, as I said, and then I came over to the United States and became the worldwide controller. In the year 2000, there was a Y2K crash, and they expected that all the computers were going to crash, so there was a crisis in the technology sector in 2000-2001. This company decided to sell the European operations, but for that, the European operations had to get restructured. So I went back to Europe and became the Chief Operating Officer for all of Europe, and in that role, restructured companies and basically set them up to be sold. I found a buyer in Eastern Germany- after the reunification of Germany they received a lot of funding from the government in GErmany to go out and be successful and they were looking for companies to buy so I found them- and that company acquired the European operations. After that, I said, “Maybe I’ll stay in Europe, or come over here”, and then the company said, “Why don’t you come back?” So I did, and Vice President, mostly in vendor relations, so that was talking with all the software publishers in terms of how they wanted to go to market, so I did that for a while and then after that I became CFO, and then COO. Basically, my adagio was you simplify, you structure, and you focus, so that’s basically what I did. We focused only on a couple of lines; if you have 25 priorities, you’re not going to do well in any of them, but if you do 2 or 3, then you’re really going to focus on them.
In your time at Wayside, what technologies and innovations did you oversee?
We went from a process, which was in the beginning, say you needed software for an employee of yours. They would call the reseller, the reseller would then send over a fax, we would send the fax over to the publisher, and then they would create a license a week later, and they would fax the license back and basically would deliver to us. We would then call them or email them with a number and say they could start using the software. As you can understand, that is very inefficient. So we went straight from there, and that’s when electronic delivery systems were invented. That was also very complicated. Ultimately, we just created a system where you could send a license key through email, and you could click and activate the software. We made sure that clients could order and get it that much faster. If you order something through Amazon, you wanted to get it thirty minutes later, right. So we shortened the time to delivery, and then what we did is we really looked at pricing in all these different categories. We’re selling more than 40,000 different products, so which ones are we making money on and which ones are we not, and which ones should we focus on and which ones should we not? So we just restructured- simplify, organize, and focus.
What made you make the choice to leave Wayside and join NJIT?
After a while as CEO, they wanted new ideas, and I had served in that capacity for 12 years, so it was time for me to move on. Then, I went to NJIT in a position to really help, motivate, guide, and mentor the next generation of entrepreneurs. At NJIT, I became the Chief Commercial Officer, so I did all the business outreach for the university, and I continue to do that. In addition to that role, after a year the university asked if I could also lead the New Jersey Innovation Institute. At that institute we really try to spur innovation in New Jersey and the surrounding areas. Within the NJII, which I took over 6 months ago, I restructured it to set up six divisions. Our largest division is in healthcare. We run the HIN, which is the healthcare information network for all the 72 hospitals in New Jersey. So that connects all the hospitals, and we do the technical operations for that network. For instance, if you’re a patient and move from one hospital to another, it’ll be very good for the hospital to have information about you that you authorized to share for the hospitals. So we do that, we help with contact tracing, we help automate doctors’ offices, all kinds of federal programs to get reimbursed for doctors. A lot of doctors’ offices are still very paper-based, so we help them automate that and put it all online. So that’s our largest division, then we have a division called Entrepreneurship and Business Incubation. We work with students and also people from the state in terms of starting a new company and accelerating the growth in that company. We help them with funding, we have monthly talks, and if you guys are interested, every first Wednesday of the month is “Coffee and Bagels”, from 9 to 11, and is basically connecting everybody: students with investors, with entrepreneurs, and just let them network. So that’s about entrepreneurship, and we also have a Biopharma division. We built a brand new gene cell laboratory, we have a defense and homeland security program, so we work on drones with the military, we work on antennae systems for helmets so you don’t have that long antenna sticking out, robots, we do a lot of work with the army- some of the programs are classified, other are not- but we do a lot of work with them. And then we have a division called human capital. If you want to get a certificate in cyber security, but you don’t want to do a four year program at a university, we have certificate programs where basically you get 400 hours of instruction and you get a highly regarded certificate for cybersecurity, and you’re almost guaranteed a job in cybersecurity. A lot of people who are mid-career and want to change careers, they can do that program, 400 hours of instruction lasting basically 4 or 5 months, and they get a certificate and get a lot of help with job placement, and can get a job almost right away. That’s just an example, but we do a lot of other programs: leadership programs, certificate-based programs, digital marketing, any of that stuff. So that’s human capital, and then we have the data and technology division. We do all sorts of things; we do, for instance, the calculus that you have to take, we can now do that online. You pay a small fee, and that’s given by your school but it’s actually produced by us in conjunction with the faculty at Stevens Institute. We designed that whole program, we do all the billing, all that stuff. But also, we do virtual reality training for engineers, so you don’t have to have a whole platform, you can do it in the classroom but you have the tools in your hand and everything is in immersive 3D. They also train nurses that way, we do energy projects, all kinds of cool new innovative projects. So that’s about NJII, it’s on the forefront of innovation, we get a lot of grants, and it’s super interesting to work with new companies and innovation.
Could you talk a little about how NJII supports innovative companies, both by students and entrepreneurs?
Usually, what you find if you have an entrepreneur, it’s great to have an idea, but then you say, “What kind of company should I form?”, and “Who should I give share to?”. Sometimes, what you see is that there are 4 students working together, and they say, “Hey, we each get 25% of the company and we’re good!” But that might not be the best way because after a year, you find that two students work really hard and the other two don’t, but they have 25% of the shares. So, how do you set up a system, and then how do you invoice your customers? If you’re paying an attorney, what are normal rates for an attorney? What is insurance- what kind of insurance do you need? How do you market your product, and what should you pay for these online marketing tools? So just a lot of stuff besides having a great idea that you need to be good at. So what we’re working on is a venture studio where you can come with an idea, and we’ll do the billing for you, we’ll take care of setting up the organization in such a way that investors can invest in it, etc. I highly recommend you talk to Will Lutz, we’re also working with a couple of large national business incubators to set up shop at NJII in our building in Newark, to get new ideas and to fund these ideas with a lot of money and help them start.
What are your plans for NJIIs future?
The future of it is, A. We set the organization up for future growth and complete sustainable operation. It’s great, for instance, to do business incubation and startups and research, but someone has to pay that bill, right? We need to find sustainable sources of revenue, and that’s what I’m doing at NJII, to really set them up for the future to have the organizational structure to allow them to grow.
Have you personally had any entrepreneurial ventures or any startup experiences?
I’m actually one of the co-founders for FC Monmouth. We are a semi-professional soccer club in Monmouth county, and basically we’re seven entrepreneurs and we got together, and we think that soccer is really going to take off in the coming years, and we want to take the local soccer to the highest experience, and unfortunately professional soccer is not really taking off yet. We bought the rights to the National Premier Soccer League to start a semi-professional soccer team here. I’m one of the seven owners, and what you do as a startup is, you know we don’t have a stadium yet, there’s limited resources, so what you do is try to figure out what’s the biggest bang for your buck in terms of starting this company. What we had to do was get people into the stadium- well, first of all we had to find a stadium. We found a local township stadium in Red Bank that allowed us to use that on Saturday afternoons, but then we had to figure out, should we play these games Saturday morning, or what time should we play them to get the most amount of spectators. When you start something new, nobody knows that you’re there. So we decided to have a contest for a mascot at the local schools, and to give free tickets away to local primary and middle schools so they could come to the games. My wife and I decided to break up the responsibilities, and here you have 7 guys that all have different roles in life, and different positions, but we were literally rolling out the signs, we set up food and drinks, we contacted the players, we hired the trainer, and all that stuff, so it really is a roll up your sleeves and go to work kind of job.
You were also the chairman of the board of NJTC, a non-profit tech organization. How did your experience with innovation differ between a non-profit organization, the educational field with NJIT, and the corporate field with Wayside?
NJTC, see, is a non-profit, but basically its function is to connect all the four private companies. So NJTC, it’s okay and actually better to be a non-profit because all the members are for-profit companies and they don’t want a new company to be competing with them, but a non-profit connects all the four companies to network. There was a study done by a Harvard professor years ago about clusters. For instance, there’s a big pharmaceutical cluster in New Jersey. People normally say, “It’s not good to be close to my competitor because my workforce can just jump the fence and go work for my competitor.” But actually, what it’s shown is that it grows the overall market because employees are more likely to relocate to an area if it’s not just one company in a specialized field that is there, but if there’s more companies. There’s New Jersey, Silicon Valley, and a lot of people in the industry are trying to build these clusters. NJTC is basically trying to connect and inspire the local community to build these networks because you’re much stronger if you know the ecosystem you’re playing in. And even though every now and then you walk into a competitor, that’s okay, but you’re also more likely to find partners to develop products with, that you can sell combined products, so that’s much easier.
How has your experience been with sustainable innovation at NJII or Wayside, and how do you see it developing in the future?
So I personally think that a lot of the science to help decarbonization and help sustainability is already here, but mostly the innovation is stifled by vested interests, and large companies who have large financial interests in the current technology. For instance, in the energy sector, there is a very safe nuclear way of using bent fuel rods, Bill Gates talked about that, but the current electricity companies mostly have vested interest in the current infrastructure. You see the public opinion saying, “I don’t want to live next to a nuclear reactor.” Your generation is much more open to that because there’s trust there in technology, but the older generation is typically not so trustworthy because they’ve had a lot of instances with disasters like a Chernobyl or something like that, but there’s a lot happening there. We can do a lot with solar, and the technology was out in the 70s but it’s being adopted lately because they started giving a lot of financial incentives. Most of the technology is there, but it’s the financial incentives. Tesla is a great example, because the current industry didn’t really want to move to electric cars, they thought it was nonsense. They tried a little bit and said, “Look, we have the Toyota Prius, it didn’t really work too well so we’re going to go back to combustible engines, we’re good.” And then Tesla said, “No, this is not good enough,” and then they designed a really cool product, so that’s how it’s going to go moving forward. We are very focused on sustainable energy at NJII. Electricity, clean water, decarbonization is huge, and there’s a lot of the smaller companies that are super interested in that, so we definitely focus on that.