This guest blog was contributed by Andrew Bennett, co-founder of KnowledgePost and $25,000 Innovation Fund award winner. It's a firsthand perspective on the Innovation Fund application process.
IP. Many of us have heard that commonly used abbreviation “intellectual property.” IP includes patents, trade secrets, trademarks and copyrights. If you have an innovative idea that could, some day help people or solve a real world problem, then being a little versed in IP, especially patents, could be very important.
Hardly a week goes by that I don’t hear about an entrepreneur’s new service or product. If you’re one of those innovators toying with such a technology right now, then you must deal with some very critical realities. In fact, I would boil those realities down to five basic elements.
As virtual reality continues to make headlines as it floods into the main stream tech scene, one startup recently funded by Innovation Fund Northeast Ohio is hoping virtual exercise follows suit.
This month, the Innovation Fund announced its latest funding round, injecting $250,000 into seven Northeast Ohio startups. This cycle was a first for us—it was our first venture into gaming technology.
This article was originally featured in the Winter/Spring 2016 issue of Community College Entrepreneurship, a publication of NACCE.
Every quarter a handful of entrepreneurs are pitching their companies to the Innovation Fund investment committee. That same day, the committee decides which companies will receive between $25,000 and $100,000 to advance their technologies.
The founding team of Renewable Carbon & Electric is trying to change how we produce energy and make products. With a recent $25,000 Innovation Fund award, the company will continue to test the wood-based carbon products they hope will help reduce the environmental problems facing the world today.
Sizing the market is a necessary task for business planning and budgeting for all startups. Those seeking investment from third parties want to be particularly diligent in this task, as VCs and angel investors need to know they are investing in a business with potentially large market size. To determine the market size for your startup, ask yourself the following four questions:
The Ohio Third Frontier's Entrepreneurial Signature Program has been supporting Northeast Ohio's incubators and entrepreneurial support organizations for approximately ten years now. GLIDE joined the ESP as a state-funded incubator 2006 and since that time we have helped numerous companies through the challenging early days of their startup.
You know the old saying, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again?” Well, it’s pretty fitting for the Innovation Fund’s application process. On average, it takes entrepreneurs two to three attempts before they win funding. Surprised? I’m not.
What do you think of when you hear technology transfer? Maybe you picture a university professor approaching the school's technology transfer office with an idea that has been the basis of her graduate team's research for years. The college then foots the bill to patent it, build a prototype, and license it to a startup for commercialization.
I wish I had a dollar for every time we are told that the market really wants this product or service. For most startup companies conducting well designed and professional market research is a non-starter. In addition getting even limited access market research reports can also be very expensive. Scouring free online news reports can be helpful but generally they only report a snippet of the actual data in a market research report and very seldom question the validity of the study. Some startups conduct informal surveys that can be helpful but probably not conclusive based on who they pick for the study.
Well, this is a first! The first GLIDE blog...when we started GLIDE in 2001 I am not sure if blogs existed. But over ten plus years you see and learn a lot. And that's what the GLIDE blog will be for the most part, a discussion of the entrepreneurial lessons we've both learned and shared in the past decade. All the questions we've been asked by entrepreneurs and the business advice we've given will make their way to this blog.
