Welcome to The Rapid Center, a state-of-the-art facility that offers our partners access to highly qualified faculty and staff, equipment and facilities and technical capabilities to address your engineering needs. Our goal is to partner with inventors, entrepreneurs, startup companies and well-established businesses to help move their ideas or products forward toward successful commercialization. Working together, we can promote economic development for the entire region.
蘑菇短视频is focused on using research and knowledge to serve the needs of business partners throughout the Southeast and beyond. Our Rapid Center will help you get results you can use - a prototype, proof of concept, new information, designs, drawings, suggestions for process improvements, innovative problem solving, new business ideas and more.
If you have a specific schedule for a top-priority project, you will want to work directly with our faculty and staff. As partners, we will work with you to meet your goals. You can be sure your intellectual property is protected by contract, and our Analysis and Testing Agreement (ATA), which specifies the project scope, will help us together manage your deliverables, deadlines and more.
To become a business partener, make an appointment to visit the Rapid Center. If a project is a match for our capabilities, the center develops a specific scope of work for the project set forth in our working agreement 鈥� the Analysis and Testing Agreement (ATA). Specifics cost, timeframe, deliverables and details of the project are identified in the 鈥渟cope of work鈥� within the ATA document.
If your project is less deadline driven and perhaps more exploratory in scope, you may want to work with a team of highly motivated students, helping to mentor their progress on a two-semester Senior Capstone Project. As a project sponsor, you can be directly involved in the students' work while you consider their potential as future employees.
There is no charge for preliminary discussions and initial project assessments. Once
you decide to work with us as a business partner, there are fees for engineering design,
testing, prototyping or fabricating services related to your project. The scope of
work for a project segment will specify the total cost of all services, staff and
student resources, materials, equipment usage and other details.
A business counselor from North Carolina's Small Business and Technology Development
Center (SBTDC) provides Rapid Center clients with product commercialization counseling
services at no-cost or very low cost. Examples of no-cost counseling include: business
plan writing assistance, marketing strategy review, financial analysis assistance
and operations planning. Examples of fee-based counseling services include: one- and
two-day tactical and strategic retreats conducted at clients' business locations.
The Analysis and Test Agreement (ATA) includes a statement of work, definition of technical requirements, deliverables, delivery dates, liabilities and responsibilities, costs and budget. It includes a confidentiality agreement to protect your intellectual property at whatever level you require over the course of your work with the Rapid Center.
The ATA outlines our intellectual property as follows: