This month marks the fifth anniversary of the first grant the Idea Foundry ever gave.

Since then the firm, a nonprofit that focuses on helping small tech firms grow, has given grant and management help to 40 firms.

The idea behind Idea Foundry is to give startup companies the management experience that will keep them from making the kind of mistakes that kill new companies.

Michael Matesic, the chief executive officer of the firm, said he has plenty of experience with failure. Every company he has ever worked for went under, including Metalsite, a company that promoted on-line trading of metals at the height of the tech boom.

At Metalsite, Mr. Matesic met Jeryl Schreiner, who is now the chief program officer of Idea Foundry. The two of them took the lemons of their experience and have mixed them into lemonade by convincing local foundations to fund them to the tune of $8.3 million.

In addition to funding its five-person non-profit, Idea Foundry has used $5.2 million to provide capital to the companies it is helping.

Returns on those investments will be used to fund other companies.

The 40 companies the group has worked with thus far span a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, education, health care and media. Those companies have, in turn, created 277 jobs.

"Their organization has provided keen insight," said Greg Petro, who has come up with a system to evaluate how products will perform in the market.

Mr. Petro said he has been working with Idea Foundry since October with his company, First Insight, which has a contract with Macy's to predict how items will sell.

"From an experience perspective it's been very beneficial to us," he said.

Mr. Petro said Idea Foundry had helped his company approach both customers and potential funders of the new technology by helping write the materials they needed for those meetings.

"We help them with their messaging," said Idea Foundry's Mary Beth Guzzetta, who specializes in helping to market the companies.

Nehal Bhojak, who researches the products and technologies at Idea Foundry, said First Insight allows regular consumers to be "fashionistas." They can see how well they can predicting the popularity of items.

"It turns it into a game," Ms. Schreiner said about the technology, which creates a sort of focus group.

In addition to helping develop the written materials, Mr. Matesic said, Idea Foundry also helps companies make the connections they need.

"We help introduce them to everybody from their lawyer to technologists," he said.

In some cases, Mr. Matesic said, Idea Foundry helps companies by keeping them away from potential markets until they are ready to enter them.

He said one of the big mistakes entrepreneurs make is to sell a product before they have it firmly in hand.

He said the Oakland-based firm also helps to keep ideas developed in Pittsburgh stay in town, so that the approximately $1 billion spent every year on research locally does not leave town to enrich other regions of the country.

"We're not there yet as a region," he said about keeping the profitability of locally developed technologies in the area. "We're just scratching the surface."