Author - Cameron Cushman

September 11By Comments OffRead more...

Meet the Companies of Techstars Physical Health Fort Worth Accelerator 2023

Get to know the startups in the Techstars Physical Health Fort Worth second year's accelerator cohort. Check out the companies and their innovative solutions for addressing the challenges and opportunities that exist in the world of Physical Health.  Brilliantly: The flagship product, Brilliantly Warm provides flexible and safe warmth for your entire body, all from your bra. Our wearable warms up your whole body invisibly under your clothes and effectively at your core. Comeback Mobility: The ComeBack Mobility Smart Crutch Tips are an IoT biofeedback device & mobile app to guide patients on how to apply the right amount of force to the...

August 9By Comments OffRead more...

Training an Innovation Workforce

Workforce development. It seems like everywhere I look someone is talking about developing our local workforce to meet the demands of today’s employers. But what does this really mean and more importantly, how do we actually develop our local innovation workforce? If you ask just about any local entrepreneur or CEO, they will tell you that hiring the right kinds of employees is one of their biggest challenges. It’s a challenge for BNSF and Lockheed Martin to hire qualified rail line and manufacturing workers. It’s a struggle for retail establishments to hire front line workers and restaurants to hire cooks. But...

June 13By Comments OffRead more...

Startup Champions Network Policy Summit Recap

Last week, several of us from the HSC Next team attended the first-ever policy-focused summit hosted by the Startup Champions Network (SCN) in Washington, DC. Though the SCN crew has been hosting Summits in locations around the country for more than a decade now, this was the first one they held in our nation’s capital and the first one focused on policy for entrepreneurs, innovators and the organizations that support them. The conversations were encouraging and insightful. Here are a few of my takeaways from DC. First, we discussed how to build a more entrepreneurial workforce. Traditionally, Federal and state job...

February 16By Comments OffRead more...

7 Things You Can Do to Celebrate Innovation Day!

Did you know, that today, February 16th, is Innovation Day? Despite hosting a podcast called Innovate Fort Worth, I didn't either. But, that doesn't mean I'm not planning to celebrate this year! According to the National Today website, Innovation Day is, "an event that inspires young inventors to share their ideas with the world. Business organizations all over the world motivate their employees to be creative and develop innovative products and services for their customers." Sounds boring to me. But, I'll bet you can find ways to make it fun and celebrate innovation in Fort Worth and Tarrant County. Here are 7...

November 29By 0 CommentsRead more...

Breaking Down Barriers to Business in Fort Worth

“Would you be interested in making Fort Worth your 21st city?”  Alex Montgomery from the Institute for Justice (IJ) replied with an excited but cautious tone and said, “I’ll have to check with a few folks, but yeah, I think we can do a deep dive in Fort Worth.”   We had just seen a presentation of IJ’s Barriers to Business Report, research that compared the processes, costs, steps and bureaucracy involved in starting small businesses in 20 US cities and then provided actionable recommendations on how to make it cheaper, faster and simpler to start a business. The only city in Texas...

November 15By Comments OffRead more...

5 Things You Should Look for in a Cofounder

Starting a company is hard. For most people, starting a company is probably the hardest thing they will do in their entire lives. And, as much as we think about Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg starting the companies that made them into billionaires, they had cofounders and founding teams around them  every step of the way.   There is a common myth of the “solopreneurs” but in reality, most companies start with more than one founder. And yet, according to research cited in Noam Wasserman’s The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink A Startup, 60-65...

June 28By 0 CommentsRead more...

An Indicator of Innovation: SBIR Grants

Innovation can be hard to measure. One way to track it is through Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants from the US government. The number of SBIR grants awarded in Fort Worth is far below the level it needs to be for our community to foster an innovation-led economy. Recommendations on how to address this issue are included.

May 3By Comments OffRead more...

Startup Champions Network Wrap-up Durham, NC

From April 4-6, members of the HSC Next team attended the Startup Champions Network conference in Durham, NC. This group convenes twice a year to collaborate on this burgeoning career field of entrepreneurial ecosystem building as an economic development strategy.  At this Summit, the content was focused heavily on DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion). The Durham, NC, entrepreneurial ecosystem has done an incredible job supporting DEI initiatives. The leading ecosystem resource organizations are all bought in on the concept and it defines their approach to economic development and ecosystem building. It is baked into their approach from the start as opposed to...

February 23By Comments OffRead more...

5 Things to Know About the New Techstars Accelerator in Fort Worth

As you may have seen in the news recently, Fort Worth is now the home of a Techstars accelerator program that will bring startup companies to Fort Worth to help them grow and bring innovations in physical healthcare. This is big news for Fort Worth as our city was the largest city in the country that did not have an accelerator program like this, which invests directly in the companies and recruits the best of the best companies from around the world. But, accelerator programs are not well-known in our area. And, Techstars has not had much of a presence in...