Our 50th Mass Innovation Nights event celebrated the first 500 product launches in grand style in partnership with the Boston Globe, Boston.com and The Hive as our hosts. We were able to bring back 15 of our favorite products and see how far they have come in the time since they participated in their first Mass Innovation Nights. It was terrific to hear about the progress that has been made and how our Innovation Nights community has made a difference.
Instead of the individual presentations by the voting winners, we had a short presentation on the “Numbers of Innovation”. Did you know:
18 MIN companies have been acquired or merged
18 locations have hosted Mass Innovation Nights
17 organizations have supported Mass Innovation Nights with sponsorships, helping us make an even bigger commitment to the community and maintain the website.
395 MIN companies are still in business
MIN companies have raised more than $500 million through VCs, angels, grants, friends and family, and crowdfunding.
We’ll be sharing the media generated at the event, the videos, the tweets, the posts and blogs. Let us know if you created something on it and we’ll link to you, because even though it is a special event, we’re still focused on helping to provide visibility for local innovation. Thank you for your support.
All the products last night were crowd favorites from past events but the American Airlines Business ExtrAA points went to:
MouthWatchers
Racemenu
Freight Farms
Vsnap
Local video guru and author (“Get Seen”) Steve Garvey was out of the gate quickly with his Storify on the event. (Steve must have arrived early as you couldn’t easily move around the room later in the evening.) Michael Gaiss’s blog post recognized the team approach to Mass Innovation Nights — we are a team, a community, an ad hoc group but using the tools we’ve developed over the last four years (the website, the newsletter, the GaggleAMP team and the monthly live events) we’re able to make a big impact. Tech writer Janet gives us a great blog post AND wonderful pictures every month. This was no exception — including one of the best crowd shots I’ve ever seen of a MIN event. Jon Roussel added his blog. Bobbie wrote a post for Mass High Tech. Michael Morisy from The Hive wrote a story on Project Repat’s Kickstarter campaign, which they announced at the event. We also have a great podcast of the presentation from the event, courtesy of our friends at the UR Business Radio Network. Wicked Local mentioned Chococoa Bakery’s participation in the evening in the Accents blog. We compiled a round up of other tweets and posts from the event on Storify too! Share your story!