Will Maine Startup and Create Week spark an 'innovator invasion'?
Photo / Tim Greenway
Jess Knox, founder of Maine Startup & Create Week, at center, leads a planning meeting for the event in Portland.
Photo / Courtesy of Hydroswarm
Sampriti Bhattacharyya, keynote speaker for Maine Startup and Create Week, is working on a doctorate in mechanical engineering at MIT. She founded a company that makes underwater drones like the one she's holding.
Robots. To be exact, underwater drones that could find faults in nuclear reactors, be used for defense or security and teach us more about the world's oceans. They're Sampriti Bhattacharyya's favorite subject, and she's psyched about sharing her inventions with other entrepreneurs during her keynote at the upcoming Maine Startup and Create Week.
But the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral student and founder of submersible drone company Hydroswarm in Boston plans to do more than talk at the event. While she's here, Bhattacharyya wants to talk to possible collaborators in Maine to help test her prototype product.
She says Hydroswarm needs to test its prototype underwater droid, called EVE for ellipsoidal vehicle for exploration, and Maine has the necessary expansive open lakes and waters, an outdoors culture and is near to Boston, she says. Plus, there are a lot of research communities in Maine.
“It's important to leverage the strength of a place, like hiking and tourism and nature in Maine. An industry startup oriented toward that sort of thing will do well,” she says. Her keynote will focus broadly on artificial intelligence.
She adds, “At MSCW, I'll talk about robotics as a whole and the opportunity when thinking in the long term, such as the application of robotics in the ocean and how that could help create new economic opportunities.” Among them: monitoring fish populations so they can be protected and not overfished, and using distributed sensor networks to study the ocean.
That's just the type of story Jess Knox, founder of Maine Startup and Create Week, also known as MSCW, wants to hear. The event runs June 20-24.
“The keynotes are meant to drive broader conversations about innovation,” Knox says. And that includes getting Maine's innovation strengths more widely exposed.
To underscore his point, Knox located the kickoff party for MSCW at Verrill Dana's Boston office on June 8 to spread the word to that entrepreneurial hotbed.
“We have to be intentional to tell stories about Maine in other areas,” Knox says.
He hopes to attract half of conference attendees from out of state.
He's also pushing a new grassroots effort at MSCW called #Mainecorps to help give people who like Maine the tools to live and work in the state.
Outside of the regular panels, sessions and events during MSCW, Knox notes that on June 20 attendees can meet remote workers who live in Maine but work for companies in other states. On June 22 they can join the Maine Technology Institute's Tech Walk and meet the founders of cutting-edge Maine companies. And on June 23 programmers and developers can attend the MixPro recruitment event.
Last year's MSCW attracted 4,100 participants from 27 states, Japan and Canada. Almost 1,500 tickets were sold for its 70 events and 162 panelists. In its first year, MSCW attracted 1,100 participants, and this year should bring in between 1,000 and 2,000, Knox estimates.
Knox says honing the conference attendees is by choice, to create a more intimate experience. While last year's sessions were organized by topic tracks, and attendees could stick to one track and not meet people in other disciplines, Knox says this year panels are organized by broader innovation themes to get attendees to mix more.
Also, last year's event was held in multiple venues, whereas this year it will be at the Maine College of Art in downtown Portland. “This is an opportunity for more hall talk and for people to collaborate with each other,” Knox says.
Other changes to this year's MSCW format include lightning learning sessions from 11 a.m. to noon daily where attendees can learn hard skills or take a 50,000-foot view of a topic. Rather than the noon keynotes being lecture-style, they will be fireside chats with Knox and another person interviewing the keynoter. Finally, the mixers before the end of the day will give out-of-staters and Mainers a more opportunistic time to mix, Knox says, before the Mainers head home for the day. Many of the changes were prompted by attendee responses to surveys handed out at last year's event, Knox says.
Knox says it's hard to measure the economic impact of the event, partly because attendees may carry on collaborations or interactions afterward.
He says MSCW is close to reaching its $150,000 goal from sponsors to run the event. The conference is largely run by volunteers, including Knox. Last year they gave 15,000 hours to the conference.
“I'm surprised by who gets involved and why,” Knox says of the volunteers. “They can be part of something that isn't their own company. It's the 'give before you get' Cohen-Bradford Influence Model.”
Sharing the knowledge
Hydroswarm's Bhattacharyya says Knox approached her to talk at the event after being referred by another MSCW member.
“I was impressed by her being named to the Forbes '30 Under 30' list, by the hot areas she is in with unmanned vehicles and marine commerce,” Knox says.
Bhattacharyya, 28, is a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering who will graduate at the end of this summer. She also was among the finalists at the MIT $100K entrepreneurial competition and was named to Robohub's “25 Women in Robotics” list and Connected World magazine's “Women of M2M.”
Hydroswarm also is targeting extreme athletes who might want to have EVE follow them underwater and record their activities. The goal is to have EVE versions that run from $1,000 for consumers up to $20,000 for more sophisticated uses.
“We have a lot of interest from consumers,” she says. “EVE can take videos as you are diving or doing extreme sports and follow you around like an AirDog drone.”
The list of other keynoters looks equally impressive.
Mike Perlis, president of Forbes Media, started his career in Camden, where he co-founded New England Publications. Since joining Forbes Media in 2010, he transformed the company from a traditional magazine company to a global technology and digitally driven media business.
Former Portland resident Robyn Kanner, designer and co-founder of MyTransHealth in Seattle, is also a UX (user experience) designer at Amazon. MyTransHealth designed a guided search to help transgender people find quality healthcare. Knox says she identified a problem that affected her and did something about it.
MyTransHealth connects transgender people with qualified, culturally competent doctors in their neighborhood and has four categories: medical, mental health, legal and crisis care. It's a free site where users can filter results based on need, including resource type, language, insurance and accessibility. The company had a Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $33,000.
Kanner grew up in Maine and is a University of Maine graduate. Among her previous jobs was as a contractor for Boston-based New Balance, where she designed spaces for the Chicago Marathon, the Disney D23 Expo and other venues.
Rodney Sampson, a partner in diversity and inclusion initiatives at TechSquare Labs in Atlanta, is an angel investor and serial entrepreneur with four startups and two exits to his credit. TechSquare Labs has $25 million in venture funding. Sampson is especially interested in reducing the U.S. poverty and wealth gap by advancing innovation, coding, entrepreneurship and investment as a way of life, with an emphasis on under-represented communities. Knox says that as a serial entrepreneur, he also can talk about how to learn from failure.
Mimi Chun is co-founder of San Francisco-based Loveback, a service aiming to create more meaningful and reciprocal relationships between creators and fans. Prior to that she led special projects on Airbnb's product team.
Food, EdTech among panels
Each day of MSCW has panels of experts on various topics, including educational technology and the era of customized learning, corporate innovation, rapid prototyping, food waste, innovation tools, becoming a rockstar presenter, sea technology covering food and fuel for the future, getting government funding for research and development, tracking the return-on-investment for social media, artificial intelligence, health care big data and 3D prototyping.
At the end of the week, on June 24, the finale for the Greenlight Maine competition will be held at Merrill Auditorium, where one company whittled down from an original field of 26 will win $100,000 in cash. Among the remaining contestants are Chimani, Garbage to Garden and Revolution Research.
Knox says the final weekend will offer up concerts, road races and other events so attendees who stay can experience Portland.
Another chance to pitch investors
MSCW will add a Pitch Panel this year giving 30 teams of company founders an opportunity to attract investors. It will likely be held for small groups at several different times on June 21. The judges are still being chosen.
Knox notes that the panel is not a competition, “so everyone gets a shot, no matter your startup's stage, traction, revenue or funding to date.” The focus will be on delivering the best product and business ideas.
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