Incubators Archives - Serious Startups

Edison Nation Medical Lets Anyone Test Their Medical Device Idea

EN-Medical_approved_logo[1] Healthcare and medical devices are becoming a big area of growth in the startup world. But, the path to development, testing, and iterating is expensive and difficult. It’s obviously not like software, which requires time but low capital.

Edison Nation Medical is trying to help individuals with great ideas bring their medical device to market. Think Quirky–for healthcare.

Check out our Q&A with Edison Nation Medical below, and head over to their website if you have a great medical device idea.

1. What’s your startup called?

Edison Nation Medical (www.EdisonNationMedical.com)

2. What’s your big idea?

We help people bring their bright healthcare ideas to life! Our mission is to identify and foster innovative healthcare and medical device inventions that improve the quality of care and increase efficiencies across the entire hospital ecosystem. We accomplish this goal by breaking down the barriers that often inhibit individual inventors – the doctor, nurse, patient, caregiver, university tech transfer office, or small company – from getting their ideas commercialized.

3. What’s the story behind your idea?

Edison Nation Medical is a medical device incubator and online community for people interested in changing healthcare. We provide a clear pathway for anyone—physicians, nurses, technicians, entrepreneurs, even patients and caregivers—to submit their product idea for in-depth review and potential commercialization. Our business model is based on trust—trust between a person with a great healthcare invention and a company that gives a thorough and expert read to determine the value of the idea. If an idea has value, we find it, unlock it and get it to market in order to improve care, lower cost and increase access for the patient.

4. Who are the founders, and what are their backgrounds?

Louis Foreman, CEO of prolific consumer product developer Edison Nation, and leaders from Carolinas HealthCare System, one of the nation’s leading public healthcare systems, valued innovation in healthcare. They knew that creating a model whereby open innovation could exist outside the traditional R&D labs would foster new ideas to improve care, lower cost and increase access; ideas that likely wouldn’t have come to fruition as quickly, if at all, within the status quo. They launched Edison Nation Medical in July 2012.

Foreman is a prolific inventor, product developer, innovation enthusiast and small business entrepreneur. In 20 years, Louis has created nine successful startups and has been directly responsible for the creation of more than 20 others. Additional companies in the Edison Nation Medical family include Edison Nation, Enventys and Inventors Digest magazine.

Robert (Bobby) Grajewski joined as Edison Nation Medical’s president to lead the company in building innovative healthcare companies, securing licensing agreements with major medical device manufacturers and increasing the online member community of medical inventors. Grajewski has nearly 10 years of private equity and venture capital investing experience. In addition, he co-founded and launched two web-based start-ups, Heritage Handcrafted and eCollectors.

5. Where are you located?

Charlotte, NC

6. What’s the startup scene like there?

As one of the financial and healthcare capitals of the South, Charlotte has a vibrant and growing scene for highly intelligent and motivated entrepreneurs who are taking risks and pursuing truly groundbreaking ideas.

7. What milestones have you reached?

Edison Nation Medical has already developed and licensed numerous products to medical device companies. Likewise, our member community is rapidly growing. (We now have inventors from over 180 countries around the globe.)

8. What are your next milestones?

To look forward to continuing to expand Edison Nation Medical’s footprint in the healthcare ecosystem and further enable passionate inventors to get their innovative healthcare ideas reviewed and commercialized.

9. Where can people find out more?

On our website, which can be found at www.EdisonNationMedical.com. You’ll be able to learn plenty about us, but you’ll have access to even more information once you become an Edison Nation Medical member. We encourage you to sign up for your free membership today! Even if you don’t have a bright idea to submit yet, we invite you to use us for education and inspiration.

Pittsburgh’s Startup Hustlers Move Into The Hustle Den

Pittsburgh just opened up a new incubator space which will house fifteen to twenty early stage startup teams across a variety of industries. With the grit and grind that comes with building a technology startup in a blue collar town, it’s appropriately called the “Hustler Den”.

With the first class of teams set to move into the space, it’s good to know that they’ve secured an anonymous donor who’s provided the incubator with enough funds to run for three years.

The fifteen to twenty startups will have free desk space, access to conference rooms, break out rooms, a ping pong table, original Nintendo and other recreational and community benefits. They are also hoping that the teams will leverage each other’s networks along with the mentors committed to helping those hustlers.

This local Pittsburgh blog reported that over 200 people showed up for the grand opening of the Hustler Den including Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravensthal (who was also spotted at the DNC startup celebration in Charlotte this past summer with Startup RockOn). Ravensthal leads a new wave of municipal leaders that realize the days of big corporations moving into towns to create jobs are over and cities need to embrace the future employers of America.

Meet the first 14 startups taking up residence in the Hustler Den (from their website)

Allegheny Organics is committed to providing an easy and seamless organic waste recycling service to the residents, businesses, restaurants and community events of Allegheny County. Through our efforts, we aim to promote healthy eating, responsible farming, waste minimization, and local economic sustainability, which will play an integral role in reinvigorating our region and building a strong, cohesive community.

Hajj Media / Virtual Lobbies designs and tailors mobile and web solutions, to decrease the inefficiencies in appointment scheduling and line management, with a dynamic platform that not only increases the transparency of wait times, but allows people to interact remotely. The debut product of Virtual Lobbies is the “Q”, a generally applicable mobile-web application for appointment scheduling and line management for a number of markets: barbershops & beauty salons, administrative offices, mechanic shops, massage parlors,colleges & universities, valet parking, etc.

Open Curriculum is a non-profit organization based in Pittsburgh, PA with a vision to provide access to high-quality K-12 learning material to children around the world. We are involved in developing a platform that allows communities to access, create and share K-12 curriculum material, and in due course, become a ubiquitous Wikipedia-like hub for K-12 learning material.

Orro believes in aiding your team’s funding efforts, while building a sustainable earth in the process. Orro is a free and easy eco-friendly movement, where we collect and examine old electronics to ensure the most resourceful way of reusing, reducing or recycling each individual item. Orro does not require any paperwork, so get on your feet, and help your team grow with the environment today!

Private Lender Nexus helps solve the problems that many commercial real estate professionals have when looking for private money to fund their own or their clients commercial real estate needs. To find the right private lender can be time consuming and fraught with unethical lenders and brokers with upfront fees. Private Lender Nexus will be an online database of screened private commercial real estate lenders. Commercial real estate professionals will be able go to our website and enter their private financing needs and be matched with verified and ethical private lenders with no upfront fees throughout the continental United States.

Aura is a bicycle safety lighting system which illuminates the wheels of the bicycle and dynamically responds to the rider and environment.

Salad Specialty/ Team Salad is developing a specialty salad restaurant concept for the East Liberty area, focused on providing access to health-conscious and nutritious meal options in the region. We are designing a new dining experience with a creative food presentation style–inspiring everyone in the ‘Burgh to start thinking “out of the box” when it comes to eating more veggies!

Scholar Hero wants to create a web-based, tablet, and mobile app that will get scholars and students to share works-in-progress in a fun and collaborative manner. We hope to establish the most trusted and engaged place for academia online.

Source is a restaurant and educational facility that aims to inform, inspire, and invigorate customers in every stage of the sustainable growing process, from seed to plate, in a unique dining atmosphere that embraces guests as an integral part of the food production and preparation process. Source will be a beacon for health-conscious eco-consumers who wish to exercise mindfulness in their selection of food products, even while dining out, and who are interested in learning more about sustainable food systems.

Kennedy Blue Communications provides strategic communications plans to leverage clients access and impact with consumers and media markets. Services provided include: press placement, writing and editing services, consulting, web development, video and animation production, marketing and branding.

Haitian Families First (HFF) is a non-profit organization, founded by Pittsburgh sisters Jamie and Ali McMutrie that provides support by strengthening communities through nurturing families. Our long-standing presence in the community, holistic approach, and three distinct programs allow us to work with families to assess their individual needs to help them achieve their goals of family preservation and self-sufficiency. Haitian Families First preserves and sustains families by helping them to find employment, supply their loved ones’ most basic needs, and provide for their children’s educations and care.

NAVISection is a project to enhance driver licensing decisions with intelligent vehicles. Our mission is to link technologies advancing driver evaluation, training, and safety for people seeking to obtain or retain a driver’s license.

Student InTuition, a for-profit social enterprise, offers a web-based platform designed for college students who want to reduce their debt and develop better career opportunities. Student InTuition monetizes in-class work products in the form of direct tuition payments for students in exchange for high-quality work products and meaningful recruiting opportunities for sponsoring organizations.

Sponsortize is an ad platform that allows local businesses to support local bloggers and advertise to local communities.

Live Broadcast From Silicon Beach Fest Of Demo Day And More

Tomorrow at 2pm PST we’ll be broadcasting live from SBF Demo Day presented by StartEngine. As well as broadcasting from other events live throughout the whole event that starts tomorrow. Panels ranging from Meet The Accelerators to How To Hire A Developer. Into coding and actually products, don’t worry as StartEngine has you covered with a full 48 hours Hackathon going on throughout the event. Quick hint, teams from Disney are among those who’ll be showing up to show us what they can do.

Everywhere Else Beats The Valley In Forbes Top 10 Incubator List

Nibletz is growing a lot faster than we could ever imagine. We thank every one of you that’s come to the site to check out a story, or two, added us to your RSS feed and shared us on social media. Despite the rate we’ve been growing (500% month over month), we still find ourselves explaining “everywhere else” at least once a day.

Nibletz is the voice of startups everywhere else. We’re proud to bring news, interviews, and resources to those startups that are “everywhere else”. Monday Forbes posted their list of the top ten start up incubators across the country. Y-Combinator, in the valley, topped the list with $7.8 billion in value.

If you take a closer look at the Forbes list, you’ll quickly notice, like we did, that the number of incubators “everywhere else” trumped the number of valley based incubators 6-4. In fact TechStars, with offices in Boulder, Boston, New York, Seattle, and San Antonio, came in second place.

TechStars has had 114 companies through the program with 98 still active. TechStars has a franchise model of sorts, and is headquartered in Boulder Colorado. TechStars founder David Cohen has hired directors for each of the other locations. TechStars selects 1% of about 4,000 applications into their program.

More after the break
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Philadelphia Phocus: Incubator Novotorium adds second company inhabi

Inhabi is a service which matches landlords and prospective renters with each other. Using proprietary system to find the perfect match. The Philadelphia region is home to a relatively new incubator (or accelerator) Novotorium. They say that “Novatorium is a new concept and unlike most of the incubators and accelerators that you may already know.” Instead of finding companies who are looking to sell to another company for a big payout Novotorium focuses on companies who are aiming for “organic growth, profitability and sustainability” and are in it for the long haul.

Back on March 15, 2012 Technically Philly announced that Novotorium was looking for a second company to join their incubator program. On March 29th it was announced that inhabi would be joining Novotorium. Philadelphia currently has a number of incubators DreamIt Ventures, Project Liberty, Seed Philly, Good Company, and others. Over the course of the next few weeks we hope to be meeting with a number of these incubators/accelerators as well as planning to bring you coverage from Philadelphia Tech Week

The above list comes from an article on TechnicallyPhilly Desks for Startups: Infrastructure for entrepreneurs or budding startup bubble?

Startup Spotlight: Los Angeles Based Incubators

For years, Silicon Valley has been the first thought when someone says Startups and Incubators, however Los Angeles is trying to change that. In this Start-Up Spotlight, we’ll be featuring three LA Based Startup Incubators trying to change that. While Los Angeles may be famous for Hollywood, Crips and Scientology, companies such as MySpace, Helio, and Picasa have all started here as well.