The BIC opened its doors in 2020 on the former campus of General Electric - once the city’s economic engine during the mid-20th century - just east of downtown Pittsfield. The center, backed by millions in public dollars, is an attempt to attract small and mid-sized tech companies to the urban hub of Berkshire County. Five years in, Ward 6 City Councilor Dina Lampiasi says it’s doing enough to prove its worth to the community.
“I think, for those that are paying close attention and seeing the good work that is happening over there? Yes," she said. "Do I think that there could always be more PR in Pittsfield? I think that's our classic story, right? We often fall short in terms of celebrating our wins as much as maybe we should be.”
Now, millions more in public funding are pouring into the facility. Executive Director Ben Sosne says the company at the heart of the proposed expansion is called Myrias Optics. Their work concerns how we see the world.
“The technology around lenses hasn't really developed all that much since the time of Galileo. It's been done - what they call subtractive manufacturing," said Sosne. "Essentially, you take a block of glass or block of plastic and you carve it into a curved lens. And that's what everybody's familiar with, whether they're your spectacles on your face or a lens in your cell phone or wherever, a camera.”
Sosne says Myrias has developed a cost-effective way to make powerful lenses as thin a human hair.
“I use the term waffle maker, or some people liken it to silk screening a t-shirt, where they can put this master in and then run off a whole bunch of optical devices or lenses from that master, and those optical devices then can go in all kinds of end uses," he said. "So, they don't make the end uses. That could go in endoscopy machines, go in all kinds of medical devices. It can go in augmented reality or virtual reality glasses. It could go in cell phones. It can go in a lot of Department of Defense applications. It can be used to transmit data in like a data farm.”
State Representative Tricia Farley-Bouvier has been an outspoken backer of the plan. The Democrat, who serves Pittsfield on Beacon Hill, noted that the funding for the expansion is coming from three public sources alongside private fundraising from the companies involved - state grants, city coffers, and the legislature.
“Pittsfield and the Berkshire Innovation Center won this TechHubs money for $5.2 million which is, it's a really big deal because it was a very, very competitive grant," she said. "Added to that, or stacked on that, is the million dollars – $500,000 for Myrias, the company, and $500,000 for BIC, the Berkshire Innovation Center – from the Pittsfield GE Economic Development Fund. There's one last piece, and that is that there's some money in an economic development bill that was earmarked there, and we're working now to really get that money to be part of the whole stack.”
The Pittsfield City Council voted to invest that million-dollar sum in the plan in November, with the hope that it will bring jobs and other mid-sized tech companies to the community. Lampiasi’s was one of the ‘yes’ votes.
“We're putting forward our cumulative $1 million, and then we've got the additional $5.2 million from the state, and then another two in a bond that we're waiting for, right?" she said. "So that's a $7 million investment on top of our $1 million. Best case scenario in that really is that Myrias is able to hit their mark of at least 55 employees here in Pittsfield by 2028, and the companies they're working with that are coming to do work with them at the BIC see how productive that space is, and start to move toward Pittsfield.”
The local money is coming from the Pittsfield GE Economic Development Fund, which was established in a settlement between the city and the multinational conglomerate that polluted Pittsfield and the Housatonic River south of its plant there over the course of the 20th Century.
“I think we all know how important these funds are to our community," said Lampiasi. "There was a lot of harm done to us by GE and when we reinvest that money in our city, we need to make sure that it's going to have a return. And for me, it's a heavy focus on modernizing our local workforce and bringing manufacturing into the current day and into the future, and that's where I was looking, and this is a great opportunity for us to really put Pittsfield and the Berkshires on the map as far as being a tech hub goes and creating a cluster here in our community.”
Lampiasi acknowledges that there’s an added stress to how the funds are used by city leaders, given the existential nature of their origins. General Electric’s departure from Pittsfield effectively broke the community, leaving its land polluted and job market reeling. It’s taken a long time for the city to rebuild.
“Overall, what I hear is a hesitation, hesitancy to invest in what folks perceive as smaller scale but expensive projects, whereas they would prefer to have one really big thing coming to us, one really big company that's going to replace General Electric," she said. "In my view, it's better for us to have many medium and small companies doing work in a symbiotic way, where if one falls another one can move in and we're not losing a huge part of our local economy.”
Ground is expected to be broken on the Berkshire Innovation Center expansion in 2026.
