Innovation, Maine style: A creativity hub hopes to keep good ideas in-state
Photo / Amber Waterman
Jennifer Hooper, left, and Jesse Moriarity coordinate the Bangor Innovation Hub from the University of Maine at Orono.
Maine is famous for its tinkerers — inventors who come up with unusual ideas that often play key roles in new and profitable products. But those ideas often end up blooming out of state.
The fledgling Bangor Innovation Hub is designed to keep more good ideas in-state, and in the process bring startup entrepreneurs into a more fruitful relationship with the larger economy, and with each other.
Bangor is one of five hubs planned for development statewide, funded by Blackstone Accelerates Growth, a three-year, $3 million grant from the Blackstone Charitable Foundation. The hubs are aimed at bridging the gap between good ideas and profitable businesses.
Other innovation hubs are already set up in Portland and on the mid-coast through a partnership with Camden-based Midcoast Magnet. This fall, a hub will launch in Lewiston-Auburn. The fifth one is still in the development stage.
“We've got some plans in the works, and it could be in several locations,” Jess Knox, the statewide coordinator of the Blackstone hub program, says of the fifth location. “In fact, there could be more than five hubs. We'd like to cover every part of the state.”
The flexibility comes in large part because the hubs are virtual — a system of networking as much as a physical presence. But the demand for the service seems indisputable. Since the hubs started up in January, more than 6,000 people have attended events or requested services, Knox says.
Innovation in Bangor
Jesse Moriarity and Jennifer Hooper are co-coordinators of the Bangor Innovation Hub. They also work for the Foster Center for Student Innovation at the University of Maine. The university is one of the key partners in the innovation hub, along with Husson University and the towns of Orono and Old Town.
The hub has built a website called Startup Bangor that allows entrepreneurs to interact, and hosts numerous events that bring businesspeople together from around the region.
It's grown rapidly since January. “The first few events we tried attracted about 40 people,” Moriarity says. “Since then, we've had 60, 80 and more than 100.”
One focal event is called the Big Gig, with the first one in April and another scheduled for September. Another, Startup Weekend, held on the UMaine Orono campus, is a crash course for innovators, who receive a guided tour of ways to commercialize their ideas and work as a team, while meeting dozens of other Mainers pursuing the same dream.
Many of the attendees are students, but “there are people of all ages,” Moriarity says, “including retirees.”
The weekend and other events pair students and mentors — who sometimes play both roles in different settings.
Fail fast, fail cheap
Brian Rahill of RainStorm Consulting in Bangor is one of those playing dual roles. His consulting business, after 14 years, is well-established, but he's undertaking a new venture called CourseStorm, which provides a software program for adult education programs to attract and register students statewide.
Maine's adult education programs were Rahill's first paying customers, and he's since sold the program in Vermont, Wyoming, Connecticut and North Carolina.
“I've learned a lot” through the hub program, Rahill says. One of the best lessons can be summed up as “Fail fast, fail cheap.” What it means, he says, is to limit one's exposure, both in time and dollars, while developing a new product.
“We had planned to spend 14 months in development before we tried going live,” he says of the CourseStorm system. “Instead, we took three months, and made improvements based on what our customers told us.”
Another way of describing the method, he says, is “to invest the smallest amount, and take the minimum time to create a viable product. Start selling immediately, and then build out all the features and functions you need.”
His experience with the startup has convinced him that, without direct interaction with end users, a big investment to bring a product up to scale doesn't make sense.
Instead of a serious product failure that can sink a small company, “We have tons of micro-failures along the way, and fix them as we go,” he says. A bit ruefully, Rahill adds, “A business plan never survives the first contact with customers.”
Testing niche markets
Christine Carney and her husband, John, are examples of students who've been able to move directly into business, in this case only a stone's throw from campus.
Their business, Thick and Thin Designs, focuses on templates used to create cupcake toppings — “a niche market,” as she puts it, but one with an international following. They launched in November 2012 with their own “fail fast” model, using the popular website Etsy, which allowed them to test designs before being committed to manufacturing them.
The focus is on “designs you can't find anywhere else,” she says, including iconic Maine items like kayaks and lobsters, but also “ninjas, zombies and tentacles.”
The innovation hub has been a good way to compare notes and test ideas, Carney says, adding, “Winning the UMaine Business Challenge was also a big help.” Since then, with the contacts and advice she and John have received, they've decided to start manufacturing themselves, at the Target Technology Center in Orono.
“From the time we were undergraduates, we knew we wanted to start our own business,” she says. “We just didn't know it could be in Maine.”
For now, John, who's just finished his Master of Fine Arts degree, will be full-time in the business. Christine is a STEM program educator at an Old Town middle school, where she works with middle school students who may become the next generation of “engineers and innovators,” as she puts it. “It's the perfect age” for intensive math and science instruction, she says. “They're open to everything.”
Innovators as loners
Another husband-wife team of innovators is Jessica Jewell and Scott Galbati, who run Northern Maine Distilling in Brewer. Their product is 22 Vodka, which competes in the fast-growing regional distilling market.
Jewell spent the first six months of this year in the Top Gun program, an intensive pairing of seven innovators in Bangor, and 14 more in Portland, with mentors who help with all aspects of a startup business, leading directly into the innovation hub.
Jewell won the competition at the first Big Gig in April; she plans to return as a volunteer to help with the September event.
The experiences have not only led to a “ton of connections,” but some real insight into the problems and opportunities for her business, she says. She called enrolling in Top Gun “one of the smartest decisions I've ever made.”
Talking with her fellow entrepreneurs made her realize that, “though our businesses are all very different, we have a lot of the same problems to deal with.”
Jewell says the innovation hub is valuable to her because innovators “tend to be loners.” It takes sustained networking, and events like Big Gig to break down those barriers: “When people are organized around a grand challenge, it's the best way to find out we have a lot in common.”
Going where the talent is
Sometimes, the benefits of an innovation hub are more practical.
Chuck Carter has been a video game designer for 20 years, from the time he helped develop Myst, one of the top-selling games of its era, with 13 million units sold. He decided to move to Maine in large part because he loves the place, spending time sea kayaking and hiking, and because he wanted to start his own company.
The logistics of setting up a game-development company, though, are forbidding. Eager Interactive has yet to market a game — its first offering, Curio, is scheduled for 2015 release — and the company has survived “because people are passionate about building these games,” Carter says.
His specialty is adventure games, a fast-growing market sector, driven by demand for nonviolent gaming alternatives. The focus is on stories and exploration.
Carter has thought about what it would take to make Bangor a center for gaming companies, and believes it's possible. One of the biggest centers for game development, Carter says, employing more than 2,000 people, is the seemingly unlikely locale of Salt Lake City, “because that where the talent was.”
One of the immediate benefits for Eager Interactive in the innovation hub was recruiting a business development manager, Adam Mullen, a new UMaine graduate Carter met at a hub event.
Because everything is on a smaller scale in Maine, he says, “It really is a great place to network and find talent.”
Blackstone's Knox agrees with that assessment. In Maine, he says, “You don't have to work through 17 layers of hierarchy to get to the person you want.”
Once people are given the opportunity to join hubs, they respond in numbers. While a geographic focus can help, he says, “We've had people from all over the state participating, from Presque Isle and Eastport, Brunswick and Biddeford.”
Moriarty, discussing the perception of Maine as a state that lags behind national business trends, says that Maine, instead, has long been a hotbed for innovators, “only that's not what they tend to call themselves. They may see it as a hobby, or something they do in their spare time.”
Putting innovators together, Knox says, is the whole point of the new hubs. “You can see the serendipity moment,” he says. “It's a powerful thing.”
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