MDC plans southeast entrepreneurial center

Southeast Midland is drawing attention from the Midland Development Corporation as it works to establish an entrepreneurial center in the area.

MDC board chair Brad Bullock said the MDC acquired the property at 2200 S. Lamesa Road in January 2025 with an eye toward helping generate economic activity. Bullock told board members at the MDC's monthly meeting that he and MDC board member Elvie Brown approached the University of Texas Permian Basin about helping develop an entrepreneurial center.

Brian Shedd, executive director of the Office of Innovation & Commercialization at UTPB, offered a presentation on how to develop business support services at the center.

"Before investing in that property, we need an idea of what the appetite would be for services in that area," Shedd told board members.

He offered a yearlong proposal that would engage Midland's southeast community to better understand what services entrepreneurs in the area are looking for and what businesses residents would like to see come out of the program. Shedd said it would begin with a kickoff event to build awareness and then three sessions that will be built around a 10-week accelerator program based on a curriculum from Co-Starters. At the end of the year, he said the goal is to have a better understanding of how many southeast community members are interested in working toward entrepreneurship and starting a small business. That, Shedd said, could help determine how the new center is configured and what equipment and support services it needs to offer.

"I'm super excited about just this proposal and the potential of the southeast side of our city, in particular the south," Brown said. "There's a lot of need there, so the ability to collect information to help us figure out best ways to serve and to build the economy, and plus just the community in the south."

Shedd said the program would use existing facilities in southeast Midland - Midland College's Cogdell Learning Center and the Southeast Senior Center - before proceeding with development of a new center on the MDC's property.

Bullock said, "Before we got too far down the road with what an incubator building would look like, we felt like we needed to step back and make sure that there is a need, because we don't want to take the position if we build it, they'll come. We want to make sure that they're there."

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