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Welcome Putting the Business Back in Business Retention SmartBusiness – The Smart Way to Help Halifax Businesses Relationship-Building and Business Retention Making the Most of Statewide Business Retention, Expansion, and Modernization Efforts Chicago’s New Direction: Leading the Race in Global High-Performance Manufacturing Five “Musts” for Business Incubator Success Growing and Keeping Your Region’s College-Educated Workers Learning to Learn: What to Do Different in the New Modern World Competing in a Global Age: New Skills for Our Nation’s Students Business Retention on a Budget: Billings’ BEAR Program Leverages Volunteers  Subscribe
About Economic Development America
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Learning to Learn: What to Do Different in the New Modern World (cont.)
“I see,” some said, “but I don’t think I have anything to say that your audience will care about.” “Forget that too,” I said. “What we want to know is what is important to you.We’ll broadly publicize that you’ll be presenting, and guess what – people who are interested in helping you solve your problems will attend the conference because they know you have a budget for your priorities.” As Plato said, “all of us have many wants.” True, but some of us have a lot more resources than others to meet those wants.
In March 2006, the third annual InnoVenture conference had six presentations by the region’s major economic anchors, each discussing the Communities of Innovation they would like to see grow up around them. Most of these presentations focused on product-oriented research and development innovations, so we also had a series of roundtable discussions by chief information officers focused on more information technology-driven, process-oriented innovations. In addition, we had 30 or so 10-minute presentations by entrepreneurs seeking capital and partnerships with the major anchors, as well as inventors with ideas looking for business partners to commercialize them. Plenty of venture capitalists and other investors were there who want to do business with the major anchors and the entrepreneurs. The 650 people who attended InnoVenture 2006 represented 250 organizations, including major companies, universities, research facilities, entrepreneurs, investors and service providers throughout the Southeast. There are a lot of success stories from InnoVenture, but here’s my favorite: A University of South Carolina geneticist made a presentation at InnoVenture looking for capital to grow her start-up company. Her company is based on a technology she developed that allows tobacco plants to produce beneficial pharmaceuticals, rather than nicotine. It happens that the major raw material of a global industrial corporation in our area is an organic compound that grows at the equator, in places such as central Africa and the Amazon rain forest. A representative of that corporation heard the geneticist’s presentation and afterwards asked if she could grow the organic compound he needs in tobacco plants. Now his company has funded a graduate student in her lab to see if she can.Wow! If this is possible, then from the perspective of the entrepreneurial geneticist, the global corporation has infinite resources to launch her start-up company. That’s what happens when you get a diverse group of smart, talented people in the same room and let them figure out how to work together in their enlightened self-interest. At InnoVenture, this major corporation tapped directly into the flow of the global biotechnology revolution that could significantly impact the supply of a strategic raw material – and the spigot was in its backyard the whole time.
Gearing up for InnoVenture 2007 in March, we’ve developed an innovative registration system that will allow attendees to become a part of an online community before, during and after the conference. A powerful effect of this is that the online community will grow to incorporate the people that attended all of the InnoVenture events. In fact, we’re even going to offer our registration system free to those holding other innovation and entrepreneurial conferences and events, so that they can become a part of the larger online community as well.We’re also planning smaller InnoVenture meetings in other communities, in partnership with local economic developers or chambers, to focus on building Communities of Innovation around their major anchors. So, how do you learn to do different in the new modern world? We learn to work together as part of a broader community – with you specializing in what you do best and us specializing in what we do best – so that we’re stronger together than either of us is individually.
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