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May 26, 2021

This marketing event series attracted $4B for entrepreneurs, and now it’s coming to Bangor

crowd Courtesy / Mass Innovation Nights UpStart Maine will debut Maine Innovation Nights on Sept. 14. Seen here is a pre-pandemic Mass Innovation Night.
By Laurie Schreiber

Mass Innovation Nights, a Boston-based new product showcase powered by social media, has attracted $4 billion in funding for 1,500 entrepreneurs in the 12 years since its inception. 

Now UpStart Maine, a coalition of entrepreneur-support programs and organizations in the Bangor area, will debut a showcase of its own, Maine Innovation Nights, on Sept. 14.

“We’re excited to bring Innovation Night to Maine and to the Greater Bangor region to help fuel entrepreneurship,” Kaitlynn Ronan, president of UpStart Maine, said Tuesday, during a virtual presentation that featured Bobbie Carlton, the founder of Mass Innovation Nights. 

For more information and to apply, contact events@upstartmaine.org or click here.

Carlton is also the founder of Lexington, Mass.-based Carlton PR & Marketing, a firm that promotes startups and small business. In addition, she's created a speaker’s bureau for women called Innovation Women, and is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Lioness, a digital magazine for female entrepreneurs.

Her idea for Innovation Nights began during the recession of 2008, Carlton said.

“The market fell off a cliff,” she said. “It was a really rough time to be working with startups, which is what I was doing at the time.”

Courtesy / Carlton PR & Marketing
Bobbie Carlton

So Carlton launched her public relations firm and began looking for new ways to market new businesses. As a board member with the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation in Waltham, Mass., she was also looking for a way to increase visitation.

Several ideas clicked. The museum, she said, used to host “innovation days” to feature inventions of yesteryear. It seemed to be the right spot to showcase new technologies such as software applications and medical devices, which would help the inventors of the products and also attract a new audience to the museum.

At the same time, social media was taking off. Twitter had launched in 2007. Facebook and LinkedIn were growing in popularity. 

Carlton hit on the idea of holding a new-product event at the museum and to use social media, a website and a newsletter to reach entrepreneurs, market the event and promote the products.

The first Mass Innovation Night, in April 2009, featured 10 products. The first night, arranged as a launch party, drew 200 people.

Since then, 135 monthly events have featured at least 10 new products per event. The “social media community” is encouraged to blog, tweet and post pictures and product mentions on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook, leveraging their availability as free tools that could help drive visibility.

Since 2009, the events have helped to launch over 1,500 new products, connected dozens of job seekers and hiring managers, profiled dozens of local experts, and launched Innovation Nights events in other cities, she said. A staff that includes an executive director, interns and volunteers provides assistance to startups and entrepreneurs, and various venues have donated their spaces and often sponsored the events. The events have been virtual over the past year.

Organizers of Maine's first Innovation Night have not yet decided whether it will be in-person or virtual, Carlton said.

Data analytics show that social media marketing has reached over 200 million viewers, she said. Social media made it possible to reach a much large audience than conventional marketing, she said.

“We call this ‘crowd promoting,’” she said. At the first event, “Local social media mavens showed up and took pictures and were gaining a new audience because they were blogging and tweeting and posting pictures and videos. We tell them, ‘Come to this event. If you see something cool, blog about it, tweet about it. Just help us spread the word. Just tell somebody about it.’”

The set-up is also designed to make it easy for attendees to use their social networks, she added. For example, they’re handed a physical program that includes a hashtag and a QR code for the event. 

For many startups, the events are the first time they’ve been out in public with their new products. 

“So we help them walk through this first entrée into the community,” she said. “We give them detailed instructions, checklists, and we’re saying we’re an experienced guide for you to follow.”

Events have been held throughout Boston, its suburbs and as far as Holyoke, Mass.

Of Holyoke, in western Massachusetts, she said, “The idea was to test whether this concept would work in a smaller market. Everyone said, ‘Of course, Boston can support something like this.’”

She continued, “I’m not looking to take Innovation Nights into San Francisco. I’m looking to take it into Boise [Idaho] and Bangor. I want to build Innovation Night communities.”

Organizers of Maine Innovation Nights have opened the application process for the Sept. 14 event, said Gavin Robinson, a vice president with Bangor Savings Bank, one of the sponsors.

“We’re looking for products at the launch phase,” he said. “That’s when companies and individuals need the most help. That big burst of exposure will help them get into their target markets and get their cash flow going.”

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