Entrepreneurs / Small Business  September 18, 2015

Innovation Center’s approach helps companies thrive

Tim Bour
Innovation

The Innovation Center of the Rockies, headquartered in Boulder, was a co-applicant with Launch NY on a recent $500,000 Economic Development Agency award titled “Transforming a Traditional Economy Through an Enhanced Entrepreneurship Mentor Model.”

Launch NY is an economic-development nonprofit that is headquartered in Buffalo, N.Y. Its mission is to help entrepreneurs succeed in a 27-county region that includes the upstate New York cities of Buffalo, Rochester, Ithaca, Binghamton and Syracuse.

The unique contribution of the Innovation Center of the Rockies is to provide access to a national network of experts who can assist emerging companies supported by Launch NY to overcome critical technical and business obstacles and, as a result, grow sales and increase jobs.

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The Innovation Center has built a national network of about 1,800 expert advisers since 2006 in support of our work with Colorado research universities and emerging Colorado companies, with a particular concentration in Boulder. These experts can cover the full range of topics being investigated at research universities and include bioscience, clean technology and energy, engineering, IT/software, aerospace, natural and organic, agriculture and veterinary medicine.

In January, the ICR initiated a pilot program with Launch NY. Since that time, ICR staff has worked with seven Launch NY companies. Our approach is to work in close collaboration with Launch NY Buffalo staff along with Launch NY entrepreneur-in-residence staff located in their 27-county upstate NY service area.

The Launch NY EIRs support between 100 and 200 companies and have weekly discussions with ICR staff identifying the companies that can benefit the most by working with ICR domain experts. Once a company is identified, the ICR staff performs a search against an approximately 1,800-resume database looking for individuals that have both the background and interest in working with the specific Launch NY company.

The ICR staff facilitates discussions between the Launch NY company and the ICR domain experts to make sure a path to overcome obstacles is developed. Resolving the obstacles may take multiple discussions with ICR domain experts, and the ICR staff continually monitors the quality of those interactions.

The results achieved since the start of 2015 during the pilot program led to the ICR becoming a co-applicant on the recent EDA award. The goal is to ramp up the Launch NY companies working with ICR domain experts. We expect to be working with 10 to 20 Launch NY companies in the next 12 months.

Most economic development approaches rely on local entrepreneurs to support emerging companies in their community.  The ICR-Launch NY relationship provides access to a national network of domain experts that expands the technical and business expertise available to the companies in the Launch NY community.

The availability of this expanded expertise, when combined with a carefully facilitated process of identifying the company obstacles and interaction with domain experts, can accelerate the sales and job growth of the companies.

The EDA grant provides funding to expand the number of Launch NY companies the ICR can support, and over the next 18 months we will be carefully tracking the value added by the ICR domain expert network. 

There are many communities that would benefit from connecting their emerging companies to a national network of domain experts. The ICR is in discussion with other communities interested in how the ICR domain expert model could benefit their emerging companies.

The ICR approach is scalable, and we have invested in software and communication tools that allow tracking progress with companies and building trusting relationships between emerging companies and the domain expert network.

We believe the results demonstrated with Launch NY, coupled with the expansion of activity supported by the recent EDA grant, will accelerate the interest from other communities in working with the Innovation Center of the Rockies.

Tim Bour is executive director of the Innovation Center of the Rockies.

Tim Bour
Innovation

The Innovation Center of the Rockies, headquartered in Boulder, was a co-applicant with Launch NY on a recent $500,000 Economic Development Agency award titled “Transforming a Traditional Economy Through an Enhanced Entrepreneurship Mentor Model.”

Launch NY is an economic-development nonprofit that is headquartered in Buffalo, N.Y. Its mission is to help entrepreneurs succeed in a 27-county region that includes the upstate New York cities of Buffalo, Rochester, Ithaca, Binghamton and Syracuse.

The unique contribution of the Innovation Center of the Rockies…

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