How do you enter ‘innovation’?

When people ask about innovation, I always wonder about the entry point in the discussion. I think generally we've all bought into this narrative of innovation coming from some ivy league programmer in a dorm room that creates some game changing disruptive technology, drops out of school, and raises tens of millions in venture capital to fund a hoodie wearing army of hackers to grow at an exponential rate. That's honestly less than one thousandth of one percent of innovation. If you want to see the daily grind of innovation, a great place to start is Founders Circle at theClubhou.se.

We meet every week with company founders for a roundtable discussion on inspiration, fears, customers, taxes, partnership, exit strategy, you name it. This week we had Rebekah Correll, founder Augusta Connection (http://augustaconnection.com), a startup that aspires to make all the great things in Augusta easier for locals and visitors to find. Arthur Abdon, better known as Art the Artist, runs ASAP: After School Arts Program (https://arttheartist.biz). Art is a soft spoken veteran who found his voice through art. He developed ASAP to help kids in the Augusta area find their own super powers by learning to draw and opening their own voices.

This week had two in depth discussions sparked by Tom Knuth's questions about how to develop an exit strategy for his company Stilt.Pro (http://stilt.pro). Tom is a mechanical engineer by trade and recently left his career at John Deere to pursue his own agricultural product technology ideas. At just over a half year in, Tom is seeing that raising capital around hardware development is much more challenging than it is in software due to the inherent differences in cost efficiency. Like many founders, Tom has to weigh the strategic development of his company and his own passions in work. While we still don't know the ultimate direction Stilt.Pro will take, his drive to help plant growers become more efficient keeps him focused on the most efficient direction for his business to achieve that goal.

Rain is focused on building governance models that protect user data even after she exits the company and is no longer in the position to manage those protections herself

The second conversation was around corporate governance processes, which sounds completely boring until you start your own business and begin to think about how to scale it, maintain accountability to your vision, and maintain reliable delivery of products and services. Aurella Rain Walker is an Augusta University student and founder of the Aura Program (http://auraprogram.org/), a personality testing company that helps its members better understand themselves and how they can engage the people they interact with. She is struggling with governance systems both at the corporate and the technology level that will limit the ability of data she gathers to be used in unintended ways that might have negative consequences. Pursuing this answer alone could lead to innovative methods of data management and encryption that solve not just her immediate problem, but others as well.

Throughout the discussions, we also had Jonathan Marshall sitting in for his first Founders Circle. Jonathan is a graduate from our first cohort of Code Boot Camp and now has an idea for his own technology startup. He’s not ready to talk about the idea yet, but is here to listen to the stories and lessons from everyone else while he figures out his own transition from idea to company. We can’t wait to learn more when he is ready to discuss it.

So in summary, innovation is wildly varied and highly personal in practice. It is centered around the passion of individuals to solve a problem and create a sustainable business solution around that. At theClubhouse, we work to provide innovators, entrepreneurs, and technology developers a place where they can find expert help, learn from each other, build a community of support, and ultimately connect them to private and public sector resources they need for their efforts to succeed.

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