The Innovation Center Initiative

By Alan Talansky

The Innovation Center Initiative proposes to combine individual student creative potential with existing Community College assets to nurture business creation and job growth.

• It will leverage the infrastructure and the nascent entrepreneurship programs of our community college system to host environments that encourage and reward creativity, collaboration, and responsible risk-taking;

• It will hold Innovation Competitions to attract and promote new ideas;

• It will recruit and coordinate businesses and investors from local communities t provide funding, sponsorships, and mentoring to competition winners to improve their odds of success, and;

• It will inform current curriculum and create new curriculum allowing SMCCCD students to better prepare for the rapidly changing job marketplace.

This unique public private partnership will be expanded by locating the Innovation Centers at our other community colleges, we change the public's perception of the community college system from "occupational" to "entrepreneurial", further engaging the local community and ultimately building an additional self sustaining job creation engine.

The Innovation Center Initiative provides a unique and distributable model for uniting government initiative in education, new business ideas, local expertise, and private sources of early stage investment capital to cultivate new businesses and to accelerate local job growth. Its design and structure ensure continued focus on its mission to create durable relationships between diverse sectors of the community, which intrinsically deliver benefits to all contributors and participants.