It may have been a Thursday night, but it was still Mass Innovation Nights in Waltham at the IBM Innovation Center.  Once again ably hosted by our friends at IBM, we gathered to check out what’s new in Massachusetts innovation and blogged, tweeted, videoed and networked! We also welcomed the Boston-area finalists from SmartCamp and heard from the  winner.  (Helpful hint:  you can still enter SmartCamp in other locations!)  It was also part of New England Innovation Month — go #NEInno.

Huge thanks to the SmartCamp finalists for jumping in like the pros they are to man the tables and explain their products after a full, exhausting day at SmartCamp! Thanks, SkyMeter, Sendsor, ProxPro, Sproxil and GISCloud.

Our goal, as always, is to help local companies make some noise, get some visibility, and make connections.  Over the past 15 months, we’ve hosted more than 150 companies, generated thousands of tweets, LinkedIn status posts, Facebook posts, blog posts, video, pictures and links.  Here are a few from this month:

Joe Cronin from Rewatchable gave us a nice roundup of the presenters.  Our friends from BostInnovation also did a roundup of the presenters and visited a few of the tables too!  Our friend Janet brought her new friends from Neuron Robotics (congrats on the new job, Janet!) and did a nice blog post on the presenters, tables, experts and gave out kudos for the networking opportunities.  We also got a nice post from MIN first-timer, Janet Egan,  “a darn good tech writer for hire” who gives Experts Corner participant Bill Scher props for helping her with her tech writing pitch.

Here are some quick snapshots from the evening — check out JumperSearch’s slides.  What to hear what Tony_Artuso was talking about with Proxpro?  Or find out how VC Ready really gets new clients?  Or find out how far away we had people coming from for the event?  Or some of the silly questions that got asked?

Don’t forget to let us know if you blog about the event, or one of the companies.  We’d love to link to you.  Also looking for video from the evening, @bobbiec was too busy getting pitched by MassChallenge companies — we’re an “endorser” — to get out the Sony HandyCam HD.  (The MIN-ion is thankful, a well-earned break from video-editing.  You can still check out our previous videos, or post your own on YouTube.  The most recent video is from our most recent Innovation Breakfast presentation by Bill Warner.  Note that we’ve transitioned Innovation Breakfast to a Friday morning drop-in, 8:30 to 10:00 am at the Cafe on the Common, Main Street, Waltham.  See you there.

Image courtesy of Metropolis Creative

Last year Scott Kirsner gathered together a group of folks to declare June Innovation Month in New England.   It was nice to see the attention being paid to local innovation and maybe Scott’s columns, the mentions in numerous blogs and the consolidated calendar helped to encourage a few more people to get out and see what others were doing.

Based on the success of that effort, it was a no-brainer to make it happen again – Scott called together a group of folks and we discussed ideas for how we could make Innovation Month 2.0 better, faster, stronger…

Today we’re kicking off the second New England Innovation month – look for events and blog posts marked with #NEInno.  (MassInno expects to see even more blogs contributing to the effort this year and we will do our level best to Tweet about them, link to them and other help promote them as they promote New England Innovation.  Drop us a line if we’re slow to link.)

We’re excited to be involved in New England Innovation Month.  We’ll do anything we can to encourage people to leave their desk, get out of the office and do something a little out of the ordinary.   You never know when inspiration may hit.  You never know what may inspire you.

And here’s where we depart from the usual Mass Innovation Nights script.  (BTW, if you didn’t already know this, we’ll lay it out for you.  Mass Innovation Nights is a super-friendly networking event – we encourage all and try to make sure we have something good to say about everyone.  We’re the nicey-nice event in town.)

Forget inspiration.  Forget networking.  Forget about “working together because when one of us wins we all win”.  Do this for you.  When was the last time you looked at what the competition was doing?  Maybe with an eye toward one-upping them? When did you last sit in on a demo from one of those super-hot startups who will be competing with you for investor dollars?  How long has it been since you really took a look at what is going on in your own back yard?  And looked at what your own firm is doing with a critical eye?

How long have you been working on your current project?  For your current company?  Is your knowledge about the rest of the industry really up-to-date? Competitors.  Potential partners.  Parallel industries.  What do you really know about them?

You need to get out more.  Seriously.  You owe it to yourself.  You owe it to your company.  If you are an entrepreneur, you owe it to your investors or potential investors. Get serious about educating yourself about what else is happening in the marketplace.  And the best way to do that is not by sitting at your desk.

Consider your ass kicked…

But in a loving supportive manner.

Some of the blog posts already out there:

Computer Science Teacher thoughts

Jay’s Custom Computers

5 Ideas

The Daily Grommet Blog

Greenhorn Top 10 Events in June

Eric Paley

Digital Lumens

Believe it or not, we actually had time for something else last Wednesday.  The IT Sector Dialogue event gathered the leaders in the Massachusetts high tech community to discuss how we can make a difference in the state’s economy and the IT sector’s competitiveness.  Held at the Cambridge Microsoft offices (beautiful space), the event gathered a veritable who’s who in Massachusetts-based technology, government and academia.  (I’ve worked in the industry for more than 20 years and spent the day recognizing names and faces.)

As tech events so — it was the bomb.  The event consisted of a series of speakers, panels and breakout sessions.  There was plenty of time for networking and connecting with the other members of the audience and the speakers.  There was plentiful wireless and power — extension cords plugged into floor sockets scattered thoughout the room.  (Hey, it’s the little things that make me and my laptop happy.)  The keynote address was from Rodney Brooks, founder, chairman and CTO of Heartland Robotics, and a founder of iRobot.  Governor Patrick spoke.  A team from UMass Donahue Institute spoke to results of their study on the sector.  (Although it seemed odd that most of the results just seemed to be testing attitudes of Massachusetts IT sector executives.)  There was a very interesting panel with top folks from Sycamore Networks, Advanced Technology Ventures, Akamai, Shoebuy.com and Visible Measures.

There has already been quite a bit written on other peoples’ impressions of the day.  Scott Kirsner, Cesar Brea, and the “official” site, the Innovate Mass Tech site.  There were also dozens of tweets and the media was out in force too.  At one point we were sitting between @digiphile and Wade Roush (Xconomy, check out their upcoming event, XSite) with Scott (Mr. #NEInno) two rows back and Doug Banks at the other end of the room.  The mood was upbeat and, well, earnest.  Ideas flew.  For the most part, the skeptics took a back seat — even when tough questions were being asked (see any tweet that contains the word “non-compete”.)

So, how do you affect mood?  How do you have an event that feels a certain way?  The introductions and day’s questions were focused on what we can DO as a group.  That certainly helped set the overall expectations.

The keynote is an important part of the mood setting too.  Brooks comes from a well-known Massachusetts success story and is currently involved with a new venture — a mark of confidence and an upbeat move if I ever saw one.  Brooks talked about how IT is under-estimated and showed he knew his audience by using a Star Trek example.  (Look at the classic Star Trek communicator, supposedly a tool common 300 years in the future, and compare it to today’s iPhone, common 43 years after the first airing of Star Trek: TOS and tell me someone didn’t underestimate the progress we would make in handheld telecommunications.)

If you were there, do you agree with my “mood assessment”?  Or, was I just sitting with the happy people and reading the happy tweets?  What do you think was done to help maintain that mood?

And before anyone scoffs at this blog post, remember, consumer confidence is a major economic indicator.  Events like the IT Sector Dialogue could help shape the confidence of innovators across the state.

P.S. And, for feel good events, hard to beat this week’s MITX annual Technology awards.  (Thanks for the invite, gang!)  In addition to lots of the usual suspects among the finalists, there were lots of young up-and-comers with neat new stuff.  Check out Wade’s article on the event.  Oh, yeah, and note the survey on the economic impact of the New England Internet and marketing industry.  Repeat after me, $28 billion.  I feel better already.

June 2009 is New England Innovation Month

With June being New England Innovation Month, we decided to dedicate the Mass Innovation Nights blog to helping out the cause.  The biggest part of what we do is highlight new and innovative products, services, ideas and people, so we’re kicking things off with a short interview with Scott Kirsner, author of the new book Friends, Fans And Followers, the Innovation Economy blog and Boston Globe column, and New England’s Chief Innovation Officer (thanks to Jeff Bennett for the title.)  Scott and others got together one night to bring New England Innovation Month to life.

MassInno: Was the initial planning meeting itself the result of long planning, a specific impetus, or a group of people from a certain event?

Scott: It was a bit of an off-shoot from this year’s Nantucket Conference (the 10th edition), and how much good energy there was about new  ventures and entrepreneurship at that event. Then I noticed that  there were a lot of things happening in June, including “What’s Next  in Tech,” an event that I’m moderating at Boston University, along  with an Xconomy event, and stuff organized by MITX, Mass TLC,  MassNetComms, and of course, MassInno.

MassInno:  Did you go into this meeting thinking, we’re going to create a month-long celebration of Innovation in New England?

Scott: Not really. In talking with a group of people about how we can foster  more inventiveness and creativity and start-up activity in New  England, the idea for an Innovation Month just sort of emerged. Fresh  Tilled Soil built the site in a couple days, a few people created  logos, and then a bunch of folks on Twitter started using the tag  #neinno to let people know about it. The unfortunate thing about  artificially-created months (like National Rabies Prevention Month,  for instance) is that they’re nothing more than a press release. We  decided to skip the press release and just get people involved  through the social Web.

MassInno:  When you put out the call for ideas, what did you get?

Scott: Well, the central idea is that to jump-start the regional economy, we  should do more connecting and communicating — so we’re trying to  encourage everyone involved in New England’s innovation economy to  participate in at least one event in June. Beyond that, there has  been some talk about a “Daily Candy of New England Innovation” –  though I’m not sure exactly what that would entail… databases of  companies, people, and investors… new ways to connect students with  local companies… and, one of my favorite ideas, a collection of  digital baseball cards of New England geeks. Hopefully, what happens  in June will spawn lots of ideas that take shape throughout the rest  of 2009.

MassInno: Thanks, Scott!  Of course we’re loving the idea of more connecting and communicating, especially at live events.  But digital baseball cards sound like fun too!  Collect all of them!

June 2009 is New England Innovation Month

As part of New England Innovation Month, Scott Kirsner challenged us to think of ways “to get people talking, connecting, collaborating, and thinking in new ways about how we launch and grow innovative ventures here in New England”.

While we were talking with one of our entrepreneur buddies last night, it occurred to us that with the launching of Mass Innovation Nights, we’ve had a unique opportunity to view innovation in New England.  We’ve made many new friends and gotten a fantastic view of the services and organizations that already exist to support innovation.

So, in the interest of sharing innovation connections, here’s the Mass Innovation Nights Lucky 13.  This is a list of local events, groups and buddies for innovators looking for connections and inspiration:

• Boston Post Mortem
• BostonTweetUp
• Boston World Partnerships
• Mass Technology Leadership Council
• MITX
• MoMo Boston
• New England Games Sig
• OpenCoffee Cambridge meetup at Andala
• Social Media Breakfast Boston
• Social Media Club Boston
• StayInMA
• Tech Stars
• Web Innovators Group

And this is by no way a complete list of all the resources out there to help you, Mr. or Ms. Innovator.  Read Mass High Tech and the BBJ for local business news.  Check out Boston.com’ s calendar, Mark’s Guide, Gary’s Guide and others.  Follow the multitude of blogs writing on the local innovation scene.  In addition to Scott’s columns you can find lots of others who attend local events and share their experiences. Look for the tag #NEInno on Twitter.

Calling all innovators: please add your fav New England Innovation Blog, Resource or Supporter below!