216 W. Michigan Ave. Michael Ploof of Tinkertech in downtown Ypsi, right across from SPARK East headquarters, has a unique space. Sewing machines line the room that looks out of a storefront on the main drag packed with antique tin-ceiling shops. Events here at Tinkertech focus on everything from Arduino controller programming for automatic garden watering to 3D printing and laser cutting to electronics.
As of 2019, Detroit now has 4 unicorns–Duo, Stockx, Rivian, and OneStream–tech companies valued at more than 1 billion dollars. Detroit is home to a growing number of startups that are slowly revolutionizing the city’s economy and the economy of the Midwest, which is attracting back talent from the coasts due to balanced work-life culture, affordable cost of living, and growing tech-related industries. It’s still a work in progress, but Michigan appears to have finally stemmed the tide of talent leaving for jobs elsewhere.
Recently, Phimation Strategy executive coach Dave Haviland and team piloted a podcast with Ann Arbor SPARK called SPARK.grow and a new pilot program for mentoring startup founders and tech professionals called Rising Leaders. Now, even if you’re not part of the first cohort, you can join the Rising Leaders program for a panel on leadership and career advice in Ann Arbor.
We knew this would happen, it just came sooner than expected. We couldn’t possibly cronicle all the amazing tech-related events around Ann Arbor and Detroit, much less the entire state of Michigan, in one post anymore, so our tech events posts will now contain highlighted events you might not know about or one-off conferences you won’t want to miss.
“We’ve been experiencing 3-4 years of 30% growth rate year over year,” Human Element’s Ben Lorenz tells us. “We’ve been an Inc 5000 company 3 years in a row and last year were named one of the Top 20 fastest growing companies in Michigan.” Ann Arbor is one of the fastest growing tech hubs in the Midwest, but what explains some companies like Human Element growing so much more quickly than others? To some extent, it’s positioning and the market they’re in. It’s no secret that AI companies are hot, as well as security. An e-commerce strategy company like Human Element has a lot of work to do catching up Midwest companies to digital business processes and online sales. But that’s not all it is.
Rebecca Cunningham, the University of Michigan Interim VP for Research with Tech Transfer and Kelly Sexton, Associate VP for Research at Technology Transfer and Innovation Partnerships at U of M TechTransfer, held a panel this week at Celebrate Invention on a milestone year for the University of Michigan developing inventions, research, and startups from work done by faculty and researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. TechTransfer is the licensing office that helps researchers and faculty at the University of Michigan who develop inventions and new business ideas spin off intellectual property with proper licensing from the University of Michigan. This year, according to Cunningham, the University of Michigan has developed 502 new inventions, 198 patents, 232 licenses and options with industry, and founded a record 22 new startups.
It’s day 2 of DevOps Days Detroit at CCS overlooking the downtown skyline of Detroit from New Center, and once again the theme is trending toward a common challenge for devops teams: handling disasters and rollouts. Devops folks are no strangers to stress, and the speaker lineup this morning covered a number of recognizable topics to people on teams who have been faced with an onslaught of challenges.
Day one of DevOps Days Detroit is in progress in downtown Detroit at the Alfred A. Taubman Center for Creative Studies, launching with talks by national and local speakers on subjects from data security to tech education for underprivileged youth in Michigan. Executive leader and coach Ryan Lockard kicked off with a talk on “The Enterprise SRE (eSRE) Approach, discussing how SRE helps turn fragile, error-prone enterprise computing into robust systems. “Even further,” Lockard’s talk summarized, “with Contino’s Enterprise Site Reliability Engineering (eSRE), you can tap into your organization’s ability to connect technology decisions to the customer experience or business decisions.”
Kristin Judge is a former Washtenaw County Commissioner elected in 2008, who has also worked as Director of Government Affairs at the National Cyber Security Alliance where she worked with Google, the FTC, FBI, SBA, DHS, and NIST to educate the public on how to protect sensitive data. As such she was the perfect person to run the CyberCrime Support public-private collaboration that helps consumers and businesses after they have been the target of cyber-fraud at FraudSupport.org.
Age-old story at this point: “A lot of people don’t realize how important supporting entrepreneurship is for the economy,” Doug Huesdash, COO of the ACRE AgTech Incubator in Allendale, west Michigan, tells Cronicle. “We see GM and Steelcase, and we need them, but small business hiring now equals large company hiring.” This is according to GAN, the Global Accelerator Network that Acreagtech is a part of, a spinoff of Techstars.
Evan Adams is the Capital Programs Manager at Detroit’s Build Institute, a Detroit-based incubator founded in 2012 that has already graduated more than 1800 entrepreneurs focused on community-impact ventures. The Build Institute runs several programs to mentor, house, and fund entrepreneurs, including SOUP and Kiva, which Adams manages to help startups of all kinds pitch for funds and find mentorship in Detroit.
The world requires innovation—now more than ever. Science. Technology. Engineering. Math. Along the wild shores of Lake Superior, researchers, students, and entrepreneurs create the future. So says the website for MTEC SmartZone, a tech incubator that is located on the shores of Lake Superior in northern Michigan. You can’t get much farther north in the United States toward fresh air and rugged wilderness at the gateway to the Keewenaw Peninsula that juts out into cold and stunningly beautiful Lake Superior, and you can’t get much better aligned with Michigan tech. That’s because MTEC operates out of Michigan Technological University in Houghton. One of the biggest challenges currently facing Michigan’s new growth in tech-related industries is that there is so little media coverage or visiblity for all the smaller players that make up a very large movement of startups that are revitalizing Michigan’s economy. Who knew there were tech incubators all over the state of Michigan? Hardly anyone, including us until recently.
When new businesses start up, arranging financing can be fraught. When that process involves a bank loan, it’s hard to know where to go. Many banks have a reputation for turning away small or risky tech startup businesses. Good news for tech businesses in Ann Arbor and Southeast Michigan. Bank of Ann Arbor, which according to DBusiness is now the 4th largest bank in Metro Detroit, has created an entire division specifically for financing and guiding tech businesses in the growing startup hub. BOAA Technology Industry Group President Michael Cole says this has been a long time in process. Cole has been working for the past 17 years to create business financing options specifically tailored to tech and life sciences businesses in Southeast Michigan.
