It’s late night here at Innovation Central and we just finished out our Blitztime phone networking chat.  Got some great feedback on what was essentially business speed-dating on the phone!

Before that we did our level best to bring Twitter to its knees with our August Virtual Mass Innovation Night event — and I think we succeeded.  Those last 15 minutes or so we were seeing huge delays in the Twitter conversation.

A Virtual Mass Innovation Night doesn’t give the same rush as the several-hundred-people- in-a-room “real life” Mass Innovation Night but there are some up-sides.

• No parking hassles; no one got lost, or towed…
• No bruises.  (Rolling out those tables in the ballroom at CRMI should qualify you for hazard pay.  Oh, wait, we don’t get paid, at all. Darn.)
• No unflattering photos — why does everyone take our pictures after we have been rolling tables around and are sweating and look like we have been run over by a herd of turkeys.
• Anyone can join in (we had some left-coasters join in the fun and even our Farthest Flung Fan, from Germany)

We had a couple hundred tweets generated for #MIN5 in less than an hour — even with the Twitter Hassles.  (It’s been suggested that Twitter slowed us down “for our own safety.”)  I’m hoping to see some blog love for our Innovators.  I did see some connections taking place.

We had some great questions from the peanut gallery that came in before the event –

Q1) “What does Innovation mean to you?”

• Getting stuff done –> Success at *delivering* innovation. Delivery is not in and of itself innovation.
• @MichaelGrover: Innovation has a lot to do with just getting something done

Q2) @corum wanted to know “who’s  hiring?”  (This question was on a lot of minds.)  On a more serious note, “What selection criteria do you use when screening?”

• @dlane: #1 hiring crit is entrepreneurial mind-set. Startups are a different animal, & you need to have the “fire in your belly.”
• @tsummit: simple & powerful job screening can be accomplished by evaluating work history/what companies the candidate has worked
• @NovellMBAJobs Hard work isn’t enough. Skillz count.

Q3) Do you agree that 21st century innovation remains 99% perspiration?

• At the end of the day, if you don’t have a great idea, all of the perspiration in the world is not going to get you over the hump.
• perspiration = execution of innovation. But even process can be innovative.
• perspiration could have negative connotation but it also could mean hard work

Q4) From @kfl007.  How do you continuously foster innovation in your organization? And balance it with getting daily work done?

• Chip away waste and innovation emerges
• Whatever you are doing (marketing, writing SW, etc), don’t just settle for doing it the way it’s always been done.

Innovator Break: We also asked each of our Innovators what made their product innovative:

• The genealogical database of companies and our “affinity matching” using the professional graph, makes Genotrope.com unique
• SharedSchool creates a discovery engine for lesson plans
• Validize — Our innovation is that we allow individuals and businesses to share their true identity anywhere online – a safer internet.
• Virtual Computer uses transformational technology to make it as easy for IT to manage thousands of PCs as it is to manage 1.
• Virtual Computer — We also do some neat tricks for the end-user, like personal OS and corporate OS on the same PC – fully isolated.

And, thanks a ton, Mike from Blitztime.  It truly was a hassle-free way to network on the phone and brought an element of fun and surprise into the mix.

I have to give credit where credit is due.  These folks have guts.  These are the “throw caution to the wind” people.  Something new, something different and they show up.  That’s the kind of courage (or crazy) that I love to see get rewarded in the marketplace.  These are the companies who have made their innovations part of our Virtual Mass Innovation Nights event on August 12.

These are the companies who have so far signed up to participate in the August 12 virtual Mass Innovation Night. (#MIN5)  Check out their videos and blog posts, check out their websites and on August 12, be prepared to talk about innovation in Massachusetts.  (BTW, if I missed your video or blog post for Virtual MIN — let me know ASAP.)

Guests and participants:  We’re doing a tweetchat (check out my Twitter Tools blog post from a few months back if you need help navigating a TweetChat) at 6:30 p.m. and switching over to the telephones at 7:30 p.m. for a Blitztime telephone networking event.  RSVP here for the Tweetchat! And/Or sign up now for the Blitztime networking event.

August really represents the interesting depth of Mass Innovation Nights.  We’ve got cool non-tech products as well as some great technology.  Remember, there’s always good inspiration to be found outside your industry — go forth and explore!

• Context Dynamics
• Genotrope
• The Pump Pro
• SharedSchool
• Validize
• Virtual Computer

Check out some of the great videos and blog posts our Virtual Innovators created:

• SharedSchool’s Blog Post: SharedSchool: Teach Better, Together
• Virtual Computer’s Blog post — Is There a More Innovation Massachusetts Company?  We Don’t Think So.
• Validize’s Blog
• Genotrope’s Blog
• Context Dynamic’s Video

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First of all — don’t head out to Waltham on Wednesday, August 12.  (Unless you live there, of course.)  Get comfy at home or work or wherever you get your online access.

We’ll kick things off at 6:30 pm with a tweetchat — everyone will be using #MIN5.  Use the Twitter search function or something like Tweetchat or Tweetgrid to join the live conversation.

The Rules:

1. Introduce yourself to the group! (You’ll be able to see everyone who RSVPs on our site.)
2. @MassInno will lead the conversation, asking questions (suggestions?  Comment below)
3. Have fun and play nice!

How about taking a moment to RSVP now?

After our group Twitter conversation we will break into a series of one-on-one conversations over the phone.  Yes – networking over the phone.

On BlitzTime (one of our May Innovators), the phone platform we’re using, you’ll have a private conversation with another Massachusetts Innovator for about 5 minutes. Hopefully you’ll make a good connection that will lead to a relationship. When that conversation is over you’ll be automatically connected to a different Massachusetts Innovator for 5 more minutes.  Then another… and another … and… in all you’ll meet 8 different people in private,
one-on-one conversations.

One last thing:  You can actually choose who you want to meet during our BlitzTime telephone event.  After you register (which you must do ahead of time, how about RSVP’ing right now) you can see the list of people who’ve registered and mark people as “I want to talk with them”.  Blitztime recommends you do this on the afternoon of the event so you can pick from everyone who has registered.  BlitzTime will do everything it can to make your wishes come true!

Come and join us — would love to get your feedback on our first four live events too!  And, of course, we’ll see you  September 9 at the Museum.

There are always some people who get up a little earlier than the rest of the crowd — they are out there with a response very very quickly.  Here are links to just a few of the “First Responders” for the May Mass Innovation Nights.

My friend Chris Herot is always speedy and got up a great blog post and his photos.  If you want to look around the Museum itself, he’s got some nice shots (must have been when everyone else was upstairs!)

We just popped a quick video up ourselves. If you weren’t there yourself, you can get a quick lay of the land from my standing in the middle of the ballroom and panning in a circle.  Plus we had a short conversation with Mike from BlitzTime.

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I can’t even begin to count the dozens, probably hundreds of Tweets with #MIN2, #MIN and @massinno.  I do want to share one of my favorites from Mark (@EndlessBlue75). As an experiment in driving real business results from Mass Innovation Nights, this tweet warms my heart.  Did you meet people you can do business with at Mass Innovation Nights?  Let us know.

Larry Bouchie from TurboPR always manages to beat everyone to the punch with on-the-spot tweets specifically about our innovators — good mini-reviews of Pixily, Nexiwave, Hubunity, IBM Lotus/Live, ClickHealth, and isayusay.

More coming.  Send us your blogs so we can link to them!  And, we’ll get then up ASAP.