Creative Class

In early March, under the leadership of SOCHE, Richard, Steven, Lou, Rana, and I worked with 32 catalysts in Dayton, Ohio. The energy of the people, the strength of the art community, the leading universities, and the culture of innovation (from the Wright Brothers to Wright-Patterson) made for an exciting couple of days.

I recently came across a great example of the Dayton’s creative assets in action. This article from the University of Dayton highlights the winner of their recent business plan competition.

From the piece:

Salud del Sol, an innovative new business from a team of University of Dayton
students aimed at bringing the ‘health of the sun’ to medical treatment
in developing countries, took home the $10,000 first prize to help get
the venture off the ground.

Winning the 2008 University of Dayton Business Plan Competition, the team of
Lauren Dokes, Lori Hanna, Daniel Hensel and Anna Young
created a business plan to develop and market solar cookers and
solar-powered sterilizers.

Salud del Sol tapped other expertise at the University including
engineering, international development and social entrepreneurship,
according to project member Lori Hanna, a mechanical engineering major.
The project – the basis of her senior honors thesis – grew from an
internship in rural Nicaragua through UD ’s Engineers in Technical
Humanitarian Opportunities of Service-learning (ETHOS) program.

“Nurses have to travel to bigger health centers or hospitals to use
sterilizers, sometimes traveling long distances by bus and spending
precious time and money to have access to the equipment,” she said.

This type of social entrepreneurship is becoming more and more of a calling card/career choice of members of the creative class and places that offer combinable creative assets – including universities, mega region/international linkages, entrepreneurial institutions, and scientific talent – will see sustainable growth and improvements in quality of place.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Cities, Creative Class, Talent, Universities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.