Stephen Fleming's blog about academia, venture capital, and spaceships
During January, the first class of Flashpoint graduates pitched their businesses at three events in Atlanta, New York City, and Menlo Park, California. I've written about Flashpoint before, but I find that a lot of EI2 employees still ask "So does Flashpoint compete with ATDC? Is it replacing VentureLab?" Now that we've seen our first results, it's … [Read more...]
A new year is a good time to look back at the old year and see how far we’ve come. It’s a classic “can’t see the forest for the trees” problem... we’re all so busy working on our own individual projects, it’s hard sometimes to see the overall growth and vitality of EI2 as a whole. Below is a necessarily-incomplete list of EI2 … [Read more...]
In the fall of 2008, Atlanta was experiencing a major gasoline shortage. Hurricanes Gustav and Ike had rocked refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. Carl Rust asked David Bridges and James Seals if they could go to Savannah to help with a large College of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) proposal. Fortunately, the duo had just enough gas … [Read more...]
I prepared the following document as my testimony to the State Science and Technology Strategic Plan Joint Study Commission, meeting in Columbus on 30 November 2011. It's going to be available on their website, but I decided to replicate it here. … [Read more...]
Back in June, I blogged about immigration as it affects student entrepreneurs at Georgia Tech. Apparently that qualified me as an expert on immigration policy! Someone at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce noticed what I'd written and invited me to a forum in Washington yesterday on "Immigration and American Competitiveness." … [Read more...]
Last Tuesday, September 20th, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) and Numerex invited me to address the Second International M2M Standardization Meeting as the keynote speaker for their dinner at the Carter Center. I didn't know anything about M2M, but that's never stopped me from speaking before! So I started doing a little … [Read more...]
For my column this month, I wanted to talk about the Georgia Forward conference that was held at Callaway Gardens in mid-August. From their website, "Georgia Forward is an independent, non-partisan organization working to improve the state of Georgia by engaging business, political, academic and civil leaders to collaboratively shape a statewide … [Read more...]
There is an old Vulcan proverb: Only Nixon could go to China. --Spock, Star Trek VI When I took over EI2 two years ago, one of the first things I did was merge ATDC and VentureLab. It was the right thing to do at the time... but times have changed. Nina Sawczuk has been director of Startup Services for almost a year and has ambitious growth … [Read more...]
Thanks again to everyone who got involved in the 2011 Revenue Diversification process. Dozens of people participated, but I'd particularly like to thank Joy Hymel and Lynne Henkiel for co-chairing this year's effort. As reported earlier, the EI2-wide team narrowed down more than 140 suggestions to 11 finalists, then 11 individual project teams … [Read more...]
Chris Downing arranged for me to speak at Georgia Manufacturing Appreciation Week last week. So, to prepare, I dug into the state of the manufacturing industry, locally and worldwide. I reminded myself of a few things, and learned a few others. Manufacturing has gone through some wrenching changes in the last couple of decades -- mostly because … [Read more...]
[Read More …]
