I recently spent a couple days inside a large financial services company with a team that had been tasked with developing disruptive ideas. The team had been together for three weeks and had already come up with dozens of ideas. Members felt energized and were pleased with their progress.

While I thought many of the ideas were legitimately interesting, after a few hours of working together, a nagging concern began to creep in: that the team hadn't quite formulated what question it was seeking to answer.

It's natural for people pursuing innovation to jump into idea-generation mode. After all, when you generate ideas you feel like you're making progress. But my experience suggests that you should spend roughly six times longer generating a killer question than positing answers.

For example, consider the Tata Nano. My colleague Matt Eyring recently noted how the Nano was a victim of outsized expectations. I completely agree. I also wonder whether Tata framed its starting question in the right way.

The origins of the Tata Nano famously trace to Tata Group Chairman Ratan Tata's observing a family crammed unsafely onto a scooter. He asked a question, "How do we make a modern automobile affordable to the scooter customer?" That set in motion the effort to develop the "people's car," and its target price point of 1 lakh, or roughly $2,500.

More than a year ago I voiced a nagging concern about the Nano based on an insight from a colleague who said that there must be something more than price stopping people from buying cars, because you could get a good used car for less than $2,500. Couple my colleague's insight with overly hyped expectations, and you have a recipe for disappointment.

Could it have ended differently if Ratan Tata had asked a different question? What about something along the lines of, "How do we create a safe, affordable scooter?" Indeed, a number of companies have exciting projects that seek to do just that. While Segway sometimes is shorthand for a hyped product that disappoints ("we don't want this product to be our Segway"), the company has an exciting concept for a personal transport vehicle that is small, fuel efficient, and safe.

Coming up with the right question isn't easy. There may be an "a ha" moment in the shower, but many times the right question comes from conducting substantial market research, combing analogous industries for inspiration, holding structured discussions with experts, and having thoughtful discussions about a company's real strategic constraints and objectives. Sometimes these efforts feel frustratingly disconnected with the charge of creating an innovative growth business, but the right framing can make the right answer self evident.

The next time you or your team start generating ideas, stop. Step back. Make sure you've thought about the question you're trying to answer. Trust me: it will be worth the extra time.

Staying connected, Staying relevant

by Michael Reszler Published Feb. 5, 2006 8:06 pm

The ability to build community has been one of the biggest selling
points for local news media. When circulation numbers began declining
and audience numbers dropped, local news media increased ad rates,
because they argued there were still highly relevant to their local
community. As a new report indicates, the Internet may be challenging
that.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new study
on the growing role the Internet plays in building community. According
to the Pew study, about 60 million Americans said the Internet had
played an important or crucial role in helping them with at least one
major life decision in the past two years. While the report does not
indicate what sites and sources users are turning to, it does tell us
that the Internet is quickly becoming one of the most relevant aspects
of everyday life.

The report dispels the notion that Internet users are some how less
connected or more aloof, living in a virtual world where Web surfers
never interact with real people. To the contrary, the report shows how
Internet users often have stronger and deeper ties to their respective
social networks. The Internet: It isn’t just for geeks!

If
you want to understand the power of online communities, look no further
than the growing phenomenon of social network sites, such as MySpace, Facebook and Xanga.
MySpace.com is fueled by hundreds of thousands of young people around
the globe, though not exclusively teenagers, who build online
communities around groups of people with whom they share similar
interests and passions, regardless of where they live. For years, local
news has relied on geography as being the most important factor in
determining one’s community and social networks. Sites like MySpace
show how that is no longer the case.

---

---

If local newsrooms are going to maintain their role as a community
creator and aggregator, they need understand this phenomenon. To date,
most efforts by local media to build community online have included
offering discussion boards, the occasional poll or encouraging readers
to comment on an article. However, there are some signs that some media
outlets are beginning to realize the power of moving from aggregating
audience to building community. Recently, Minnesota Public Radio’s
parent company, American Public Media Group, made an investment in gather.com. In 2003, Knight Ridder Digital invested in Tribe.net, another social network. Both of these are early attempts to already capitalize on local news media’s audience. [Author Disclosure: This Chaser works for Knight Ridder Digital.]

Like
most of the Internet, social networking is still in its infancy.
However, in a few short months, sites like MySpace.com have demonstrated
how online communities can quickly become highly relevant to people’s
everyday life. By not developing our own online communities, we risk
losing some of our relevancy in the lives of our readers. Let’s make
sure this is not another opportunity that got away.

Crazy looking back and seeing what people were predicting 5 years ago, and thinking how much the world has changed. Myspace is out for the most part. Facebook is dominating. Twitter wasn't even on the radar in 06. The question is, have newspapers taken the hint and made community building a priority? Which ones have and which ones haven't?

Point-and-Click Politics

The Internet has fueled polarization and gridlock, but it's also giving us new tools for self-government

By MICAH L. SIFRY

For better and worse, democracy in America is changing. The Internet has introduced a new age of mass participation and personal activism in which anyone can be a community organizer, message maker or fund-raiser and mobilize thousands or even millions of people. Though organized money still dominates the game, organized people hold the wild cards.

According to the Pew Center on the Internet & American Life, about 25 million of us are "online political activists" engaged each day in sifting the news, sharing our concerns and attempting to shift the debate. We are the participants formally known just as voters. All of this new activity is exhilarating—and also frustrating.

As more voices clamor for attention, the result isn't just more noise in the public arena and more emails flooding congressional in-boxes. Mass participation by today's online activists is also contributing to governmental gridlock and a more polarized politics. And it may be turning off a crucial swath of the electorate: people who don't have the time or inclination to join in daily political debate, as well as those who don't think the issues are all simply a matter of "us" versus "them."

The democratization of participation spans the political spectrum but is most visible at its edges. It started with Howard Dean in 2004 and flowered in 2008 with Barack Obama. And now the "right roots" have mastered the new online platforms, especially since the GOP lost its hold on Washington.

On both sides, this new wave of digital politicking is driven by passionate ideologues. The most popular political blogs in America—Huffington Post, DailyKos, Talking Points Memo on the left; Hot Air, Big Government and NewsBusters on the right—all share one thing: They serve partisan red meat to their readers

So far, the rise of social media has generated more talking than listening, more pushing than parsing.

Likewise, the biggest email lists belong to groups with strong partisan agendas like MoveOn.org and FreedomWorks. And though many online activists use their platforms to unearth critical facts, user-generated media is also created and shared to dramatize and exaggerate the other side's faults—to paint the tea partiers as racist or Obama supporters as anti-American. Being hyperconnected, it seems, is contributing to hyperpolarization.

The rapid rise of social media has generated more talking than listening, more pushing than parsing, and more fragmentation of attention than concentration. The resulting sense of information overload may cause more people to retreat from the public arena, simply because it feels too crowded and noisy.

The current stack of online tools and platforms is especially good at organizing attempts to block government action as opposed to synthesizing solutions to our public distemper. If we don't change course, the future of American politics may be a dysfunctional cycle of "I can stop your bad Social Security privatization scheme; you can stop my bad energy-reform scheme," ad infinitum. Americans yearn mostly for efficient and responsive government, not bigger or smaller government. But try organizing that constituency when the news is driven by hyper-networked political minorities.

Another paradoxical result of today's mass-participation politics may be lower overall turnout in many elections, allowing well-organized ideological minorities to pick up seats that otherwise might never tilt so hard to either side of the spectrum. Tea partiers like Rand Paul and Christine O'Donnell are doing well in party primaries, but so are left-leaning figures like attorney general candidate Eric Schneiderman in New York and congressional candidate Ann McLane Kuster in New Hampshire. As more such candidates eat up precious media attention, the result may be a self-reinforcing cycle of lower turnout and more victories by strongly ideological candidates. After all, in a noisy political environment, the best way to stand out and garner support is to be outspoken.

The news isn't all bad, though. Internet-powered politics is helping to shift America toward a more open, participatory and accountable political process. Big contributors have become less necessary in campaigns, giving more influence to small donors and independent organizers. Nate Silver of the political forecasting blog FiveThirtyEight recently reported that both major-party candidates in 163 congressional districts have raised at least $100,000 in individual contributions—more than double the level seen through 2004 and undoubtedly a result of net-driven fundraising. More financially competitive races are a good thing for democracy.

Ours is also a golden age for anyone wanting to find out critical information about politicians. Before the Web, most political disclosure was on paper, if the disclosure happened at all. Now, InfluenceExplorer.com lets users find out how much any donor is giving to politicians across the country; PoliticalPartyTime.org reveals which lobbyists are hosting fund-raisers; Poligraft.com spots hidden connections in a news story; and PolitiFact.com checks politicians' claims against the factual record. Much more needs to be done to improve transparency, especially in the world of stealthy super-PACs created by the Supreme Court's recent decision in the Citizens United case, but the Internet is the best hope for addressing this problem too.

We are living, in short, at a contradictory moment in politics, defined by liberating technological transformation and public-policy gridlock. Ordinary citizens feel ever more powerless as they watch their elected leaders struggle and mostly fail to get anything done in the face of organized political minorities. But at the same time, each day seems to bring a new tech innovation that literally puts more power in our hands.

What's needed is a new political synthesis akin to the "neutral point of view" balancing act that has enabled millions of people to contribute to Wikipedia despite their many differences. Call it "we government": new forms of collaboration and service that use technology, open data and public participation to solve shared problems. This is not "e-government," where the authorities use the Web to provide information and services, but rather an effort by citizens to refashion government as a platform connecting people around the issues and needs that matter most to them. A number of public-minded start-ups are already pointing the way.

SeeClickFix, for one, enables anyone with a phone or a Web connection to help resolve non-emergency issues in their communities, while simultaneously enabling neighborhood groups, elected officials and government service providers to see what problems need addressing. The reports are transparent and searchable online, giving everyone an incentive to respond to them. Founder Ben Berkowitz launched SeeClickFix to make it easy for people in New Haven, Conn., to report things like potholes to local government, but now the company has more than 400 paying clients, including cities like Tucson, Ariz., and Washington, D.C. More than 50,000 user-generated reports have been registered on the site since its founding, with a fix rate of more than 40%.

Another platform, Localocracy, is working on a harder problem: enabling citizens, using their real names, to have ongoing conversations about issues that typically divide towns, and expanding participation beyond the handful of people who have time to attend public meetings. Though anyone can follow discussions on Localocracy, participation is limited to people who are verified registered voters in a specific locality. The site was launched last year in Amherst, Mass., where several hundred people are using it to debate issues such as school district reorganization. Now it is slowly expanding to cover more of the state.

Two other efforts, Open311 and Civic Commons, are partnerships of government technologists and volunteer software coders. Their goal is to get public agencies to adopt open systems and collaborative technologies and to ensure their interoperability. Imagine if 150 years ago every city in America had built its rail lines on radically different gauges; train-makers could never have standardized production. In a similar way, these groups are working to enable a common platform for municipal service development, so that, for example, an iPhone app that tells you where it's safe to walk home at night can work for any city.

"We government" is neither right nor left, small government nor big government. It is, rather, effective do-it-ourselves-government by people who want to contribute to their communities but find themselves put off by today's hyperventilators. The Internet is transforming our politics in some worrisome ways, to be sure. But it may yet improve how we govern ourselves, giving us new tools for working together on the everyday problems of public life.
—Micah L. Sifry is co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum and editor of techPreside

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304023804575566603208716666.htm...

Photo Illustration by CJ Burton For The Wall Street Journal

What makes "Facebook politics" inadaquete, muses Princeton's Julian Zelizer, is that it's not tied to particular spot on the map, which has always been the point around which social organizing pivots:

The most durable forms of political organization have usually depended on local organizing. During the 19th century, political parties were dependent on a dense bottom-up structure rooted in the strength of local political machines.

After Election Day, party operatives continued to remain in close contact with voters. They worked hard -- sometimes through illegal means but very often through policy and straightforward patronage -- to retain their loyalty and make sure voters were kept abreast of why their party mattered.

Zelizer's piece seems to be a reminder -- in this whole "the revolution will/will not be tweeted" debate -- that the examples of big, national or even international conversations and actions that often get the action are probably the just the tip of the iceberg. And we don't know how big the iceberg is. The Internet can be pretty good at fostering local organizing, too, even if that just means a Google Group for your condo board. Those conversations, which are often private ones and parocial ones to boot, are part of the mix, too, if we're trying to figure out just how politically salient social media and the Internet might be. But they lack the eye-catching glamour of something like resistance in the streets of Tehran.

Sent to me by the great Sam Novey. Who has probably become one of my number one sources of information since I met him at TEDxBoston.

Ben Berkowitz is our boy. That's all there is to it. Yeah he wears pink shirts, but he also is the founder of SeeClickFix, an incredible app for reporting non-emergency issues in your community (think crowd-sources 311).

Not to mention, he is one of our most vocal supporters. Every few weeks it seems we get a call from a news outlet or a conference organizer from out of the blue, and probably about 50% of the time, when I ask how they heard about us, they say Ben Berkowitz.

So click the link, and share it with you're friends. Let's put a champion of the Gov 2.0 movement ahead of that guy with the big iPhone.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/15/who-is-the-ultimate-game-_2_n_678753...

By Joe O'Connell/Daily News staff
Milford Daily News
Posted Sep 16, 2010 @ 12:07 AM
MILFORD —

A new website geared toward getting Milford residents talking about the issues that matter most to them will be launched next week by a Massachusetts think tank.

Localocracy is an online town hall forum that gives residents and local politicians a place to go to discuss town issues - everything from road construction to Proposition 2 1/2 tax overrides.

"Our whole thing was, how can we get the community to say what matters," said Conor Sullivan, 22, the founder of Localocracy. "We want to give power to the community so that it is a platform for the people, by the people."

The site is intended to bring residents, political officials and analysts together in one place to ask questions, get answers, exchange ideas and strengthen the relationship between voters and the people they put in office.

Sullivan, a Salem native and graduate of UMass-Amherst, started working on the project in November 2008, and was able to fund it using two grants from the UMass Innovation Challenge, totaling $22,500.

"I spent some time traveling across the country and a lot of the time it felt like the people in Washington didn't know what was going on in these small towns," said Sullivan. "I felt a disconnect."

In conjunction with MassINC, a think tank founded in 1996 and based in Boston, Localocracy will launch the site dedicated specifically to Milford and it will go live either next Tuesday or Wednesday. The plan is to have at least 75 participants signed up before then.

MassINC is paying $5,000 for five months of access to Localocracy, and will decide in February if it wants to continue.

The reason Milford was selected as Localocracy's third town is because it was identified by MassINC as a "bellwether" community, meaning it consistently reflects how the rest of the state and nation votes in elections.

"The point of this project is to let Milford residents talk about what is important to them and use this website as a vehicle to hash out local issues," said Bruce Mohl, editor of CommonWealth Magazine, which is published by MassINC.

Localocracy has already launched forums for Amherst and South Hadley, which Sullivan said are very successful. There are also plans to launch a site for Granby.

Sullivan and Marj Malpiede, head of public relations for MassINC, spent time in Milford yesterday spreading the word about the new site and trying to get residents to sign up.

"The response to this has been really great," said Malpiede. "People are really intrigued. Milford is a great town and it's a terrific example of real people with real issues."

The first person to sign up for the site was former state Sen. Louis Bertonazzi. He did so yesterday afternoon on a laptop computer at the Dunkin' Donuts on Main Street.

"Anything that provides information and communication on issues is good," said Bertonazzi. "The more exchange of ideas and information between the government and the community, the more advantageous it is for both."

Although the Milford site is not yet active, people can visit localocracy.com to sign up and learn more about Localocracy.

Joe O'Connell can be reached at 508-634-7521 or joconnell@cnc.com.

Clear writing is one of the most important skills for starting a successful company.   Clear writing will help you create a blog that will attract readers and customers.  Clear writing will help you create copy that is compelling and explains the value of your product to users.  Clear writing will help your executive summary spread faster through potential funding networks.

But clear writing isn't easy.

Not every start-up team has an english major and those of us who did study liberal arts often spent most of our education learning to fill our minimum word counts with complex arguments and flowery language.  Citing Foucault might help you pass Comp Lit 270, but it won't help your start-up develop customers.

So how do we learn the new writing skills we need?  We imitate Ben Franklin.

Before he was a founding father, or a world famous scientist, Ben Franklin earned his fame and fortune as a printer, and was one of the most widely read writers in the colonies.

But Franklin never went to college, in fact, he ran away from his home in Boston when he was only 17.  So how did he become the writer who would "establish the American style"?  Imitation.

When Franklin was a teen, his first written arguments were criticized as weak and unpersuasive.  He knew he had to do better, so he found great writers and reverse engineered their style.

You can do the same, here's how:

Step one:  Find an author whose style you admire.  I'm personally fond of Seth Godin, Timothy Ferris, Leo Babuta, and Clay Shirky.

Step two:  As you read one of their articles, make a detailed outline of their argument.

Step three:  Do something else.  Wait a day or two, so that you don't remember exactly how they wrote the piece.

Step four:  Go back to your notes, and try to re-write the piece in your own words, but as close as possible to how they wrote it.

Step five:  Compare the two, and look for where their sentences sound better than yours, try to figure out why.

Step six:  Rinse and repeat, every day for a week or two, then work in writing pieces of your own.

Am I encouraging plagiarism, absolutely.  You don't publish these pieces, you keep them for yourself. Writing persuasively is like playing in a rock band.  It's easier to create a hit if you start by practicing covers.

Here's the final catch though.  Clear writing requires clear thinking, for help with both I recommend this very quick read: http://www.ai.uga.edu/mc/writethinklearn.htm (download the adobe pdf)

 

Conor White-Sullivan is the CEO and co-founder of Localocracy, an online platform for local civic engagement and peer to peer news creation.  Always an advocate of grassroots democracy and bootstrapped solutions, Conor's experience includes serving as Western Ma Field Coordinator on a successful statewide ballot initiative, as assistant canvass director on a voter registration office in Northern Virginia, and as Collegiate Markets Director for an international beverage company while attending UMass Amherst.   He has spoken at TEDxBoston, the Personal Democracy Forum, the Aspen Institute's Forum on Communication and Society, and at the New York Tech Meetup and has lead the Localocracy team to two rounds of prize funding through the UMass Amherst Innovation Challenge.  He is 22 years old.

 

 

 

Written for the MassChallenge Blog.

From an excellent blog. Informationisbeautiful.net

We can do better.

Too Little, Too Late

• Posted by Bill Reader on 08/2/2010
• tags: cj

A recently reported scandal in the blue-collar L.A. suburb of Bell, California, shows how a lack of community journalism can result in obscene levels of corruption in local governments. The L.A. Times broke the story more than a decade after the city of Bell lost its strong community paper; the city government had only received token coverage for some time.

Media watcher Richard Brenneman summed up the story this way: "Not only did the [salaries] raise enough community ire to force the resignations of City Manager Robert Rizzo [salary $787,637], Police Chief Randy Adams [$457,000], and Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia [$376,288], but the city councilmembers also voted to cut back their own salaries, which averaged bearly $100,000 -- insane for a city of fewer than 40,000 residents."

It appears that shortly after the Community News was sold and stopped covering local government routinely, city officials began paying themselves salaries in the high six-figures, more than 10 times the going rate in nearby communities. The corruption appears to have gone unchecked because there was no local watchdog journalism.

Closed doors breed corruption. Sadly it took the LA Times years to open this up, as they simply didn't have the reporting staff to cover the local issues in the surrounding communities.

If we are going to have the civic health we need in communities across this nation, we have to leverage the opportunities the internet provides to pull the community into local journalism and recognize and reward the heroes in local government who are pushing for transparency and an end to this sort of obscene corruption.

The Hometown News Leviathan

Chances are good if you live in eastern Massachusetts your local paper is owned by Gatehouse Media Inc. The Fairport, NY-based company owns 118 local weeklies in Massachusetts communities from Abington to Weymouth and seven daily papers (one of which, The Daily News Tribune of Waltham, will be converted to a biweekly on August 31). It also maintains a significant local news web presence with its Wicked Local wesbites, one for each community it serves.

The company’s financial struggles — it lost $17.5 million on revenues of $133 million in first quarter of 2010, and its loss for the same quarter in 2009 was $31 million — have forced Gatehouse to cut staff. The paper in my town, the Brookline Tab, has an editor, an assistant editor (who writes most of the stories) and a reporter. If you want to phone one of them, though, you have to dial a different area code, never a good thing for a local paper. But the staff works hard and writes up a surprising amount of news and features.

I follow The Brookline Tab’s Twitter account. It has 645 follows, not a heck of a lot in a town of about 57,000, but way more than its two competitors.

The Dominant Daily

Gatehouse had the hometown news franchise to itself for a few years, until the Boston Globe Boston.com decided to take on Gatehouse, rolling out 28 Your Town hometown news websites with more to come. The Globe has a correspondent who covers several towns just for the Your Town site, but it also blends and repurposes Globe and Boston.com stories from its hundreds of reporters and editors for the Your Town sites, giving it a manpower advantage over its competitors.

The Your Town site also features a very cool interactive feature, the “See a problem, report a problem” town map, which allows readers to “Create a public record of civic problems like potholes, graffiti, broken street lights, or vandalized playgrounds.” Still, the Brookline Your Town feed on Twitter has only 196 followers.

I get the sense the Your Town sites are just beginning to find their footing. Having worked as a journalist in Massachusetts for almost 30 years, I’ve learned never to underestimate the Globe’s resources and, with backing from its parent, the New York Times Co., its financial ability to stick with a new product.

The Precocious New Kid

A year ago, AOL Inc. bought some hometown news websites called Patch for $7 million, pocket change for a company that made a profit of $249 million on revenues of $3.2 billion in 2009. According to its annual report, AOL plans to sink as much as $50 million into Patch this year, hiring journalists and techies to launch dozens of new websites.

Patch websites sprout like mustard seeds. As of this week, it had 91 local news websites in eight states — with 22 more “coming soon.” Eleven have abruptly appeared in the Boston suburbs, with three more coming soon, and, to judge by the help wanted ads on Craigslist, the company is getting ready to launch in at least two Boston neighborhoods, the South End and Jamaica Plain.

Patch’s model is to hire a full-time editor (in Massachusetts, it has been hiring editors away from Gatehouse) whose office is wherever the editor has an internet connection. And that’s it for local staff: one full-time employee. Its headquarters — which houses the executives and the people who create and maintain the websites — is on Broadway in New York City. Patch uses a roster of freelancers in each town, who make $35-$50 for each article they write.

That’s short money, even for journalism. At $35 a pop, that $50 million could pay for 1.4 million articles.

What Patch has going for it is a clear and simple way to contribute (login required) news tips or events or announcements, several news stories a day, and three of four local sports stories a week. What it doesn’t appear to have yet is readers; as good as the Brookline Patch’s Twitter feed is — it’s the best of the three Brookline hometown news sites — it has only 92 followers. With $50 million behind it, though, Patch is going to grow and grow until AOL figures out if the thing is actually profitable.

I regularly read all three of the Brookline hometown news websites and subscribe to their Twitter feeds and, really, I can’t say that one is far superior to the other two. They all have the basics of local news: town hall news, police and fire reports, events listing, announcements, news about local businesses and search engines to find local business, sports news, school news and contributors from the community.

Having three hometown news outlets available to me on the web and, via Twitter, on my smartphone has kept me much more up-to-date on town news than the weekly print newspaper did.

In fact, the ease at which I can check out local news whenever I want has made me more interested in what's going on in my town. When the print version of the Brookline Tab arrived on my front walk on Thursday mornings, I usually tossed it straight into the recycle pile. It was too hard to read -- confusingly choked with ads and small squibs of stories, and featuring way too many features that had nothing to do with my town.

The websites and the Twitter feeds allow me to get more targeted coverage, which is what I want from a hometown news source. I still want a bigger picture, an easy-to-navigate package, and the serendipity of finding stories I didn't think I would be interested in from the four daily papers I receive each day, and they provide it. I have no plans to cancel those subscriptions.

But now I can feel informed about what's going on in my town without reading a print newspaper. The transfer of my hometown print paper directly to recycling is now automatic.

There’s one other thing all three hometown news websites share: nearly unused discussion boards. Residents of Boston’s suburbs don’t seem to be engaging with these websites. If you live in a city or town served by Gatehouse’s WickedLocal.com or Boston.com’s Your Town or Patch.com (or, best of all, all three) I’d recommend you bookmark these sites and check them out regularly. Post a comment once in a while. Report a pothole.

The much talked-about future of "hyper-local" news on the web is here.

Interesting analysis from Mark Leccese on the Gatekeeper Blog at Boston.com.

Localocracy Discussion starts at 39:06

If you live in South Hadley and would like to join the beta, send an email to selectboard@southhadley.org

The Innovation Challenge is a competition for the best innovation-driven business plan produced by teams that include students, recent alumni and faculty advisers at UMass Amherst. The program includes a preliminary “elevator pitch” contest, mentoring and educational events throughout the academic year, and ends with a spring presentation to investors. This year there were five finalists in the spring competition, which set a new record total of $75,000 being awarded at a single event.

Senior Conor White-Sullivan and Aaron Soules '09 of Localocracy with Isenberg Professor and Vice Chancellor Mike Malone after he announced the judges' had awarded them $12,500.

 

Team Precision Slip PhD student Robert Daniello responds to a question from the judges while teammates Jason McCarthy and Amanda Kirkpatrick look on.

Precision Slip, a student startup firm that plans to produce drag-reducing marine hull coatings, won the $50,000 top prize in the University of Massachusetts Amherst Innovation Challenge Final Business Plan Competition held on campus on April 22. The company’s new hull-coating technology has been shown to significantly reduce drag in the laboratory and the firm looks forward to demonstrating its product’s ability to cut fuel consumption and increase speed for ships operating in the real world.

Members of the Precision Slip team are mechanical engineering doctoral student Rob Daniello of Florence, Mass., plus Isenberg School of Management MBA students Jason McCarthy of Tyngsboro and Amanda Kirkpatrick of Jackson Hole, Wyo.

Second place prizes of $12,500 each were also awarded, to Aha! Productions, a company developing software to enhance scientists’ and engineers’ ability to identify innovative solutions, and to Localocracy, a peer-to-peer online platform for local politics intended to assist citizens in learning about and taking action on local issues.

Aha! Productions team of Tony McCaffrey of West Brookfield, Mass., graduate student in psychology, and Brendan Jones, senior in Chemical Engineering of Holmdel, N.J.

“It is well deserved by these three nascent ventures,” said Michael Malone, the Ronnie and Eugene Isenberg Distinguished Professor and vice chancellor for research and engagement at UMass Amherst. He added that over the last five years sponsors have awarded a total of $355,000 to student-led teams and “we have begun to see real companies emerge.”

The Innovation Challenge is an initiative of the Isenberg Program for the Integration of Management, Engineering and Science as a cross-campus collaboration of the College of Engineering, College of Natural Sciences, the Isenberg School of Management, and the vice chancellor for research and engagement. The founding platinum sponsor of the Innovation Challenge is Wolf Greenfield, whose Edmund Walsh commented, “We are pleased to be able to support the future of the Commonwealth by encouraging innovation and fostering the development of young entrepreneurs.”

The other platinum sponsor is Saint-Gobain, whose spokesman Michael Mahoney noted, “We have recently made a multi-year commitment to support research and innovation on the UMass Amherst campus, funding graduate students and the annual Innovation Challenge. The benefits to our company have already started returning in terms of new product ideas, access to emerging technologies and even new hires.”

Other sponsors of the UMass Amherst Innovation Challenge are Eugene M. and Ronnie Isenberg; Joseph Bohan; Paul Carney ’82; Forge Partners; Eric Janszen ’04; Scott Perry ’82; Raytheon; Signal Lake; VISTAGY; Stephen Dunne ’89; Wayne Boulais ’85, ’88; Tom Gray ’87; Michael Tunstall ’82 and Karen Lauter Utgoff Consulting.

Congratulations to all our past, present and future winners. UMass Amherst is Entrepreneurial and we are proud of it!

Text: Janet Lathrop, UMass Amherst Office of News and Information

Images: Ben Barnhart, bbimages.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 24th, 2010 at 10:19 am and is filed under From the Community Manager. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

The Innovation Challenge is far and away one of the greatest catalysts Entrepreneurship at UMass Amherst, and I am proud to say that these competitions have been central to the birth and maturation of Localocracy.

For those who don't know our story. Localocracy began when I was invited by a friend to a weekly meeting of the UMass Entrepreneurship in Fall of 2008. Fresh from a summer of campaigning, and some time in Virginia leading a voter registration office, I was at first just trying to meet programmers to talk about a thesis project for changing how local government ran.

But EI quickly pulled me in. At that meeting I was wide eyed, on the edge of my seat, hearing how some students had raised money and built business themselves.

That semester I submitted the idea of "Democracy 2.0" into EI's Executive Summary and Elevator Pitch competition. Looking back, I am only thankful that we didn't make the finals on that one. The idea was vague, the business model non-existent, and I had no idea how we would get it built or to market.

Over the course of the next year, the vision got clearer. First through the classes and competitions that EI pulled me into, but more importantly the weekly meetings at Rafter's Bar were we built an incredible network of supporters and advisers.

By fall of 2010, I was the one standing in the front of the room, telling students that if they were willing to fight for it, they didn't have to take a job working for someone else, and could do much more to have a lasting impact on the world. I could be a little more convincing too. We had won $10,000 in the Spring 2009 Innovation Challenge and I had finally found Aaron Soules after a year of searching for a technical co-founder.

Now, as we head into the summer, and Aaron and I head for graduation (fingers crossed) I am proud to say that the Entrepreneurship Initiative and the Innovation Challenge have had a greater impact on my life than just about any educational program I've ever been a part of.

I told everyone I studied Anthropology because I wanted an education, not a training; and I am very glad I did. Anthropology gave me a lens for viewing the world, but the Entrepreneurship Initiative gave me the skills to change it.

The fact that we tied for second in the Innovation Challenge last week, and that we'll have another $12,500 to help us push forward into the summer. Well, that's just an added bonus.

Thank you to all our early mentors from EI, Paul Silva, Kwong Chan, Bob Lowrey, Bob Hyers, from the other start-ups, Derek Lyman, Cristos Lianadies-Chin, Boris Revsin, and those in the Amherst community who've helped us with tech and design Baer Tierkel, Will Trieniens, Ellen Neidlinger, and Matt. To Heather Demers and Karen Utgoff who organized the Challenge, to Joe Bohan, Cheryl Smith, and Steve Collins who mentored us closely in the various IC competitions and beyond and the rest of the sponsors and Judges from the IC.

Our Congratulations to the other winning student teams, Precision Slip, and Aha! Productions.

We are so proud to be a part of this community.

• CEO/Co-founder (left)/CTO/Co-founder (right), Localocracy
• Founded: September 2008
• @Localocracy
• Open gov motto: All politics is Local

Govfresh, a Government 2.0 news source, recently featured Conor and Aaron in its list of 10 Entrepreneurs Changing the way government works.

Our hats off to Ben Berkowitz and the guys at SeeClickFix, and everyone else who made the list.