CED President Monica Doss blogs again from the recent "Connect" conference Asheville:
BREC and Asheville are becoming a magnet for the pockets of innovation that are spread throughout western NC and eastern Tennessee.
We’ve all talked about our sense that pockets of serious innovation are erupting far outside of the traditional technology hot beds and that is validated here.
One group of 17 undergraduate students from Western Carolina seem to be omnipresent at the conference; they are young engineers who are inventing and developing a diesel powered small engine for home use – lawn mowers, weedeaters, generators, chain saws, etc.
I talked to Dave Lawrence, director of the Innovation Lab, a new ETSU connected technology incubator in Johnson City, TN and he says they are half full and sticking to their commercialization mission rather than trying to fill space. He also told me of a medical device company that just closed an $800K angel round from local (non-technology) angels. The founder is a cashed-out California entrepreneur whose wife grew up near Johnson City and wanted to come back, so they packed up and moved the family to the mountains of Tennessee.
In the hallways of the conference, many of us talked about this recurring, if not overpowering, theme in North Carolina and Tennessee – popping up in Wilmington, the Research Triangle area, Asheville and up through the Knoxville region where nearby Oak Ridge National Lab, like the RTP, fuel an innovation infrastructure. The mid-south region’s cities, smaller and less complicated than those in the Northeast and California, are creating an alternative quality of life for those entrepreneurs who seem to want to have their cake and eat it too.
I think we all agreed that some sort of grassroots (not to be confused with the many institutional technology partnerships that exist) entrepreneurial aggregation strategy would be valuable now that communications technology is becoming ubiquitous and accessible.