Startup Weekend at NKU builds new business

Northern Kentucky is bringing a Startup Weekend to the region Jan. 13-15 at Northern Kentucky University’s Griffin Hall, organized by a collection of regional entrepreneurial advocates.

Startup Weekend is a global, nonprofit organization that holds 54-hour events around the world for entrepreneurs, business professionals, creative professionals and programmers to meet, exchange ideas and build a company by the end of a weekend.

The goal is for talented people with different skills to come together to make an idea come to life, says Rodney D’Souza, assistant professor in the Department of Management at the Haile/US Bank College of Business, and one of the key organizers of Startup Weekend.

The weekend begins with an open-mic pitch, where individuals describe their business idea and start recruiting members for their team. Attendees vote for the best, most plausible ideas. Through Saturday and Sunday, teams develop business strategies, marketing plans and a simple product (usually Web-based) to present on Sunday night to a panel of respected local judges.  

The development of the NKU College of Informatics was instrumental in bringing Startup Weekend to the region. The college came to life in the fall of 2011 with 1,550 students enrolled in the college’s programs that range from computer information technology to media informatics. The department is housed in NKU’s sleek new Griffin Hall, which boasts a 15-foot by 25-foot micro-tile presentation platform, 47 technology-enhanced meeting spaces and classrooms, a virtualization lab, an advanced audio and video lab and a computer hardware lab.

“Startup Weekend will help advance the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the Greater Cincinnati area by equipping the next generation of entrepreneurs with the necessary skills to transform their untested ideas into viable business ventures,” says D’Souza.

“This will be accomplished by building teams around individual ideas, providing mentorship, encouraging networking and a lot of caffeine.”

CincyTech is sponsoring the event and providing mentoring to attendees along with Candace Klein, founder and CEO of Bad Girl Ventures, Elizabeth Edwards, founder of Metro Innovation and author of Startup: The Complete Handbook for Launching a Company for Less, and Dave Heilmann, chief operating officer of Sparkpeople. Judges for the event are Casey Barach, president of the ezone, and Parag Rathi, an analyst with River Cities Capital Funds. Additional speakers, mentors and judges will be announced in the coming weeks.

The program also is sponsored by Duke Energy, the Haile/US Bank Foundation, and the Kentucky Science and Technology Corp. For more information or how to register, check the Startup Weekend Northern Kentucky website.

By Sarah Blazak