1st Place ($800 & 1 year Membership to Rainmakers):
Betty Trusty received this year’s first place prize for the Morgan County Big Ideas Competition to create a calling system to check on the elderly and homebound individuals in the county. The calling system is called TrustContact.
Zankit, is a new company developed in less than 54 hours at the June Start Up Weekend in Indianapolis. This online classified ad firm believes that they have a better solution than Craigslist and plans a late-July launch.
Among the Zankit Team members was Jon Coulter, database administrator at ExactTarget and Zankit Founder, and our own Amanda Schoolcraft, our summer intern and biomedical engineering student at Purdue University — Congrats to Amanda for being a part of a winning team at StartUp Weekend!
Also, Jon Speer was quoted in the article saying, “within a couple days, they had business cards printed and were attending trade shows.” Pretty impressive!
To read more about Zankit and it’s members, click here.
…”Diagnostics division to help drugmaker tailor treatments.”
Eli Lilly has created a new division to produce tests that will “winnow out the patients most likely to benefit from a Lilly drug.” This new concept of “personalized medicine” recognizes the reality that most drugs work in only about 1/3 of the patients who take them. These new tests will help Lilly identify the subgroups of patients who will benefit the most and at what dose. The diseases that this new Lilly division will be focusing on are Cancer and Alzheimer’s.
Will there be a trend for the life sciences industry that will push pharma companies to develop diagnostic tests alongside their experimental drugs? Terry Hisey, leader of the US life sciences practice, Deloitte Consulting, believes there will be.
During the past two years, Creo Quality has been approached by a number of struggling communities who are interested in improving their economic situations. While in the past, communities who have approached CQ were interested in diving in to something without a strategic action plan, recent endeavors seem different. In particular, we have been approached by a community who wants CQ to help them identify their strengths and opportunities to target opportunities to leverage their competitive advantages and core competencies. While the project is still pending, it has been extremely encouraging to work with a community and economic development officials who have an interest in applying sound strategic principles to their growth plans.
We recently read a story in the IBJ about the city of Kokomo and its Mayor. At one point, Kokomo was ranked as having the highest average wages and is now at the bottom of the list. Now, it’s a battle of the budgets… moving trash cans to one side of the street, closing the city’s day care, etc. The biggest pitfall is that Howard County is not retaining the earnings of its best-paid workers! 20% of Howard County’s workforce lives outside Howard county and this 20% earns 30% of the income generated in the county. Kokomo and Howard County must attract more well-paid workers to live there and attract bigger companies to employ them and their Mayor is working on just that.
This, too, is encouraging to see where a little bit of strategy is being applied to help revitalize Kokomo’s downtown.
This is the final product created by the team for the original recipient.
Leg Up had an exciting week this week. We found out that there is a possibility of partnering with the newly formed IFoundation at Purdue. The IFoundation’s mission is to bring assistive technologies developed at universities to market. It seems that our product will be the perfect poster product for the foundation, because we have verified feedback that the limb functions extremely well, even for an extremely active teenage boy. (The recipient has worn it successfully for over a year.)
Please join members of INpact for an evening of networking and meet others in the medical device field with experience and opportunities to help entrepreneurs and companies with product development to effectively launch new products.
Time: 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.
Location: Bingham McHale
10 W. Market St.
Suite 2700
Downtown Indianapolis
Reminder for medical device entrepreneurs: INpact offers an advisory panel to review your technology and provide guidance for your next step. This is a FREE service. Contact info@inpact.org for more details.
INpact’s Mission:
Assist medical device companies to bring new product and technologies to market in timely and efficient manner. Focus on early stage, entrepreneurial, start-up or small medical device companies primarily in Indiana. Members of the network are service providers with a primary focus on product development. Utilize years of medical device expertise to provide the roadmap for successful product/business development.
On Saturday, July 10, the Big Ideas contestants, judges, and donors gathered together along with interested community members to hear the judges’ final results. Only three of the twenty ideas submitted were not represented by their contestant at the event.
Each “Big Idea” score was the sum of two scores:
the straight total of points awarded by all the judges
the number of times a judge placed the idea in the top four
So, who were the winners?
4th Place ($200):
Bob Johnson to build a campground in Morgan County
3rd Place ($400):
Raquel Zike to build a Skateboard Park in Morgan County
2nd Place ($600):
Jennifer Blankenship to turn the old Harman Becker building into a Community Center
1st Place ($800 & 1 year Membership to Rainmakers):
Betty Trusty to create a calling system to check on the elderly and homebound individuals in the county, which she calls TrustContact.
The evening ended with networking time and we are pleased to report that several connections were made among attendees that will potentially help even those ideas that did not win to move forward.
Medical Device, Business Development, Marketing, Strategic Planning, Licensing, Acquisitions, Product Development, Corporate Development, Corporate Strategy, Research & Development, Market Intelligence, Investors, General Partners, Managing Partners
Organization:
Life Science Intelligence (LSI)®
We continue to receive great feedback about our meetings, where deals are being made.
The top medtech investors & manufacturers will be in the audience of our next online conference where the CEOs of 20-30 medical device companies will present their emerging technologies.
Without the expenses of travel, Life Science Intelligence (LSI)® organizes meetings that provide innovators of emerging medical technologies with a convenient online platform to efficiently & securely share their business development & investment opportunities to a targeted, quality audience.
