Both the Corporate Research Center's Joe Meredith and KnowledgeWorks' Jim Flowers are quick to stress that, in Meredith's words, KnowledgeWorks "is not a captive of Virginia Tech. People can come into the incubator from anywhere."

Of course, with such a large cadre of geeks and their kin only a few hundred yards away, "Certainly we'll be looking for technologies emerging from Tech," Meredith said, and that includes Tech alumni. But they're also more than happy to include "anybody off the street who qualifies."

According to Flowers, there are three kinds of company-to-be that might gain entry to the KnowledgeWorks program - he called them "startup spin out and fresh start."

The first is the true startup; "a gleam in somebody's eye," Flowers said. the second one comes out of an existing organization. For example, a company that developed a machine may want to make a business of selling it. "That business is spun out and incubated in our program," Flowers explained.

Finally, there's the "fresh start" - in Flowers' words, "some company that has been doing something, doing it OK, but never made a breakout. KnowledgeWorks can give them a fresh burst of energy."

For Flowers, where the company comes from isn't the important part, nor, in fact, is what it does. "One thing that's important in our approach," he said, "is that rather than hunting for technologies, we hunt for people who have passion. That's one of our clear defining issues: Is there a fire in the belly?"