Charlie Smith and Jeremy Sanders have both taken products from the idea phase to reality and knew that finding money and mentoring were often the most difficult parts of the process. They built Ideator as a tool that uses community and charitable giving to grow innovation and entrepreneurship.
Ideator's December Challenge is running until December 13 at 5:00pm for people with ideas to win $10,000 and access to their Advisory Board. Judges are from the NASDAQ Entrepreneurial Center, Salesforce, Sugar Paper, Box.org and Crunchbase. Finalists will present a virtual pitch on December 15 and the pitches will be broadcast.
There are already several businesses and products in the works at Ideator on their blog page, including an app that aids the visually impaired at restaurants, and a project that uses recycled materials and wetland plants to generate grey water in the Tijuana River Watershed.
Venture Well is also in beginning another grant cycle, with their next e-Team Stage 1 applications due January 27, 2016. e-Team also gives students tools and mentorship to move projects from idea to marketplace. Three stages of the program go from a three day innovation workshop, to business model development, to venture development planning.
There are currently six teams in the third stage of the e-team process. Clean drinking water, food preservation, patient data, cancer detection, and mobility are some of the problems that the teams are working to solve with their products. My favorite project from that batch is a glass system that shades windows without using electricity or chemical reactions.
Venture Well operates mostly as a higher education network, working for almost twenty years to take projects from the idea to invention stage. Ecovative and Sanergy are both companies that started as part of the Venture Well network.
Technology transfer is one of the easiest things for people to get completely wrong when launching a product. It's inspiring to see companies working to move great ideas toward reality.