Some people speed date to find love. At Innovation Happens, they speed date to find customers — which, for an entrepreneur, is just as important as the L-word, joked organizer Sean Ammirati.
Sean Ammirati, COO of tech blog ReadWriteWeb, is one of four organizers of Innovation Happens.
Once a quarter, up to six Pittsburgh-area start-ups have been a part of this corporate speed-dating event, which pairs them with the region’s larger companies to show what the local tech community has to offer. The corporate folks are broken into small groups who go from table to table, where the start-ups have six minutes to pitch their companies.
The events, which are free and open to anyone, started 15 months ago, and now the organizers are looking to further build the event.
The goal is to create a culture of buying local when it comes to technology procurement, Ammirati said.
Organizers are differentiating these events from others in town by their focus on customer acquisition and not just how to raise funds. By securing the first customers, start-ups can gain the feedback needed to push product development and ultimately company growth.
Each time the event is held, it’s a little different than the one before based on feedback from attendees, Ammirati said.
He expects next year there will be more events that focus on a single industry space, like the event held earlier this summer that included only health care IT start-ups. The four organizers are also exploring an event just for larger companies to help them understand how to work with a small company.
The spark for Innovation Happens came when Ammirati — who is the COO of the tech blog ReadWriteWeb and was cofounder and CEO of mSpoke, which was sold to LinkedIn — and Ari Lightman, professor of digital media and marketing at Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, realized there was a desire by large companies in town to work more closely with the start-up community.
However, there didn’t seem to be a venue to introduce the two sides.
“There are a lot of really good events in town that teach you how to raise money, (but) the reality is getting customers is actually how businesses are built,” Ammirati said.
And if those first customers are in the same region, it makes it easier for everyone involved.
So far, Innovation Happens have yielded 70 follow-up meetings, and at least one deal is expected to be announced shortly, with two more deals in the works, Ammirati said.
From its initial start with Ammirati and Lightman, the event gathered two more organizers, Lou Musante, founder of Echo Strategies, and Dave Passavant, director of consumer innovation at UPMC Health Plan.
Participating start-ups have been of varying sizes. Alan Knapic, cofounder of Bracketz, was at the latest event last week to practice his pitch and to get his company’s name out there.
The start-up, which has been around since April, is run by Knapic and his wife, and offers a business-to-business marketing and customer engagement platform based on sports brackets. Similar to March Madness, products can compete head-to-head.
Knapic received some good feedback, such as questions about product’s platform capability and how customizable it is, from the corporate participants, as well as the other start-ups that attended.
“It beat my expectations,” he said.
Original post by Malia Spencer, who covers manufacturing, higher education and technology. Contact her at mspencer@bizjournals.com or 412-208-3829. You can also follow her on Twitter.