The Tech Garden in downtown Syracuse and Arrow Electronics are excited to offer the IoT, Drone, and Robotics Symposium on Thursday, November 17. You are invited to join The Tech Garden, 235 Harrison Street. where you can view presentations from leading industry manufacturers including Arrow, AVX, Bourns, Molex, Infineon, Intel, NXP, and Qualcomm. Lunch will be provided and attendees can register to win $1000 worth of door prizes. Register here by e-mail.
CryptoCuse is hosting its first official NFT Design Competition in collaboration with Newhouse and VPA. No prior knowledge of cryptocurrency or NFTs is required and anyone can submit an original work of art. Submitted artwork will be judged for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place with the chance to win a prize. The artwork will then be minted as two NFTs — one for the artist to keep and another that will be distributed across the Orange community to students, athletes, alumni, and faculty. This will create community-wide appreciation and provide benefits to both the artist and the NFT holder.
The theme of the competition is “What does it mean to be a Syracuse student?” Submission deadline is Friday December 2. Please submit your artwork to this Google form. Please title your artwork and give a description of it which will be displayed alongside your artwork as an NFT.
Top three artists will receive rewards that include a high quality JBL Flip 6 portable speaker, gift cards and disposable camera.
For NFT Holders, benefits include perks from collaborations with student organizations and the chance to be part of original CryptoCuse community with priority access to future events and collections.
For every piece of art submitted, one NFT will be minted for the artist and one minted to be distributed to the community. NFTs will be distributed after the submission deadline. After the deadline, a form will open to claim a chance at winning an NFT. There will be fair distribution across students, faculty, and alumni.
Submission Format
Judgement Criteria
Competition Requirements
Definitions
About CryptoCuse:
CryptoCuse serves to provide Syracuse University students with education in cryptocurrency, DeFi, and blockchain. CryptoCuse gives students the ability to develop their cryptocurrency portfolios while learning how to utilize blockchain as a powerful tool.
The club has four pillars:
CryptoCuse is a Registered Student Organization (RSO) housed at the Blackstone LaunchPad. Meetings are each Monday in the Blackstone LaunchPad, first floor, Bird Library at 7 p.m.
The club is open to all students and welcomes new members. Join here.
Former LaunchPad Program Managers Nick Barba ’20 and Sam Hollander ’21 were featured speakers as they joined thousands of collegiate entrepreneurs last week as part of the annual Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization (CEOORG) Global Conference. During the Chicago event, CEO members, partners, investors, and business mentors assembled in person around the theme “Frame your Future.”
Students participated in a: $20,000 pitch competition, a $10,000 Venture Valley E-Sports Tournament, and a Startup Wars entrepreneurship simulation challenge. Additionally, they heard from 65 entrepreneurs and 10 main stage founders, and networked with peers and business investors.
Barba, who is now program manager for Future Founders, based in Chicago, was part of a special CEO pop-up of their innovative Startup Bootcamp, an idea-stage accelerator that covers topics ranging from customer discovery to pitching. The Startup Bootcamp combines hands-on learning with topical lectures that will help focus on taking action.
Hollander was part of a panel of outstanding student and young alumni entrepreneurs who chatted with Courtney Gras, Courtney Gras, CTO Fellowship Community Lead with AWS Startups, who was previously director of ecosystem development for Techstars, working with the Blackstone LaunchPad network. They talked about how to infuse entrepreneurship into the fabric of universities globally by sharing their ideas and expertise with a high energy audience of aspiring collegiate entrepreneurs.
Farm to Flame Energy Inc., co-founded by Syracuse University alum Will McKnight and Kwaku Jyamfi, won the $150,000 grand prize and Envision Biopolymers, founded by SUNY ESF post graduate Christopher Thomas, won $50,000 in the FuzeHub 2022 Jeff Lawrence Innovation Fund Commercialization Competition.
The competition was held October 25-26 at the Buffalo Niagara Convention Center as part of the NYS Innovation Summit. Nine entrepreneurs from across New York State pitched their ideas before a live audience and a panel of four expert judges from the economic development community.
The annual two-day Innovation Summit was held in Buffalo, NY, and included keynote speakers, an executive roundtable, exhibits, breakout sessions on economic development trends and disruptive technologies, and tours of local Centers of Excellence and a new Incubator. Over 500 people and 100 exhibitors were in attendance. During the Commercialization Competition, which is the 4th Track in the Summit breakout sessions, twelve companies demonstrated the commercialization potential of their product or technology while competing against each other for the opportunity to win an award that will lead them closer to market.
“We are very excited to add these companies to our awardee portfolio. Many previous awardees have achieved significant, sustainable growth, and some have even received national recognition,” said Elena Garuc, Executive Director of FuzeHub, “We believe that this year’s winners are in a position to do just as well, if not better, and we are proud to support them in their journey.”
Josh Aviv ’15 G’17, founder of SparkCharge, was a previous FuzeHub winner, also working with the Syracuse LaunchPad and the Syracuse Center of Excellence (Syracuse CoE). He is now scaling the company nationally.
Both Farm to Flame and Envision Biopolymers worked with the Blackstone LaunchPad and the Syracuse CoE to develop and incubate their ideas.
Farm to Flame Energy Inc. (Syracuse)
Farm to Flame Energy repurposed a Steam Turbine to generate electricity through a smokeless-odorless and portable biomass electricity generation process. They use pulverized feed stocks as biomass to achieve a thermal efficiency of 98%, against the traditional biomass thermal efficiency of 78%.
The venture was founded in 2018 by Will McKnight and Kwaku Jyamfi to commercialize a unique combustion process that was patented by Will’s grandfather and uncle. This process allows several agricultural wastes to burn in a smokeless and odorless fashion. Stefano Alva, Kwaku’s colleague from Carnegie Mellon University, came on the team as CFO in 2020. Through funding from Carnegie Mellon University, Syracuse University, and the United States Environmental Protection Agency, FTF commercialized their proprietary biomass electricity generators and home heating products. It also recently won a competitive $100,000 EPA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant and a CSIT Award of nearly $750,000 through its clean tech seed grant program.
The company previously won very early-stage innovation funding through competitive programs through the LaunchPad and the Syracuse CoE.
Envision Biopolymers LLC (Syracuse)
Envision will provide a waste-to-bioplastic platform technology for chemical suppliers to the pulp and paper-based food packaging industry. This not only answers their customers’ demands for more sustainable packaging solutions, but also an impending critical need to replace soon-to-be outlawed workhouse chemistries (PFAS) that they have been using.
The Jeff Lawrence Innovation Fund, consisting of over $1 million annually, supports a set of activities designed to spur technology development and commercialization across New York State. FuzeHub is administering this fund as part of its role as the Empire State Development designated statewide MEP center. For more information, visit Jeff Lawrence Innovation Fund.
About Jeff Lawrence: During his more than 20 years at the Center for Economic Growth, the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) affiliate in the Capital Region where he served as executive vice president, and MEP Center Director, Jeff Lawrence directed programs of direct assistance to manufacturers and technology companies to increase their competitiveness. He is remembered for being an invaluable and generous mentor to many in the area’s business community and a tireless advocate for manufacturing innovation throughout New York. Jeff was an active mentor to Syracuse University student startups and a valued member of our regional innovation ecosystem here in Central New York.
About FuzeHub: FuzeHub is a not-for-profit organization that connects New York’s small and mid-sized manufacturing companies to the resources, programs, and expertise they need for technology commercialization, innovation, and business growth. FuzeHub is the statewide New York Manufacturing Extension Partnership Program (MEP) center, supported by Empire State Development’s Division of Science, Technology & Innovation. For more information on FuzeHub, visit FuzeHub.
The Blackstone LaunchPad, in collaboration with the Native Student Program in the Office of Multicultural Affairs, will host SU alum Terry Jones ’16 (VPA), Haudenosaunee filmmaker and creative entrepreneur, to screen his most recent short film, “Savage/Future” and share his creative process and journey. The event, from 4:15 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. on November 9 in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons, Room 114, Bird Library, is open to all.
Terry, Seneca Wolf Clan, is the founder of TornJersey Media and has a passion for sharing his Haudenosaunee history and culture through his film and video works, gaming, VR projects and acting. He strives to find a balance between entertaining and educating his audiences.
He graduated from Syracuse’s College of Visual and Performing Arts in film in 2016 and he is currently pursuing an MFA in film at York University in Toronto.
The event, in celebration of Native Heritage Month, is being curated and organized by Ethan Tyo ’17 (iSchool) G ’22 (Falk) who is this year’s Blackstone LaunchPad’s Todd B. Rubin Diversity and Inclusion Scholar at SU Libraries. It is part of an initiative to expand opportunities and engagements with student entrepreneurs and the broader university community. Ethan, Mohawk Wolf Clan, has been working with the Native Student Program on a series of events incorporating Haudenosaunee knowledge and foodways into academic programming through collaborative experiential events.
Ethan grew up on the Mohawk reservation of Akwesasne, and as a Syracuse student, came to re-appreciate the rich and long-established cultural traditions of the Mohawk people to plan, harvest, and prepare their food from the earth. As an undergraduate he published his first cookbook, building on his interests in food and lifestyle have been with him for a long time.
That led to Ethan re-engaging with his heritage, creating a traditional Three Sisters Garden installation at Pete’s Giving Garden,as a collaboration between Hendricks and Sustainability Management.
Pete’s Giving Garden returned Onondaga seeds to ancestral land for the first time in SU’s history, and was also Ethan’s culmination of the graduate practicum for his food studies degree. He recognized an opportunity to grow food not only in a sustainable manner, but in a way that honors the traditions and culture of the Onondaga Nation, firekeepers of the Haudenosaunee, the Indigenous people on whose ancestral lands Syracuse University now stands. “The ‘three sisters’–corn, beans, and squash—are foundational foods that gave rise to the strength and resilience of the Haudenosaunee people.
This led him to curating this event with Terry which will also feature traditional food and drink paired with two short films on November 9 – SAVAGE FUTURE and the moving documentary, Soup for My Brother.
Terry’s films have screened worldwide and have won several festival awards including “Soup for My Brother” which earned best documentary at the 2016 Liverpool International Film Festival in the United Kingdom. In 2020, he completed the Open Immersion II – Creative Doc VR Lab which was produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and in partnership with the Canadian Film Centre and imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, supported by the Ford Foundation. In 2021, he was part of a gaming team that was awarded BEST CONCEPT at imagineNATIVE’s Land Jam+, a game jam made for and by Indigenous creatives where participants from different disciplines work in collaborative teams to create video games and interactive media from scratch.
During the summer of 2022, Terry made his stage debut as an actor in Tuscarora playwright Vicki Ramirez’ stage play Pure Native in San Francisco. The play is being produced by AlterTheater which is based in the city San Rafael, CA. Most recently, he was the curator and host of the Haudenosaunee Micro-Short Film Program, which screened at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York in September. The program featured 14 micro-short films by Haudenosaunee filmmakers.
Terry is a true filmmaker, educator, and storyteller empowering future Indigenous creative entrepreneurs by leading with his values, community, and culture.
Please join us in celebrating Native American Heritage Month and taking a journey with an awarding winning VPA alum who produces poetic and poignant short-form stories that look at Indigenous life in a modern world.
Story by Ethan Tyo and LaunchPad staff; photos supplied.
Bookmark November 16 for “Blackstone Table Talks” hosted by the Syracuse University Blackstone LaunchPad aim to amplify and empower student entrepreneurs facing additional hurdles. The format is intimate and social conversations. Register here
Make a latte, coffee, or tea in the LaunchPad, or bring your favorite beverage, and join us on Wednesday, November 16 at 7 p.m. in Bird Library to wind down, refuel and connect with other entrepreneurs who share a similar path. The hour will be filled with inspiring discussions on:
Blackstone Table Talks is a new series that will be covering a wide variety of topics once per month. LaunchPad Program Manager Indaria Jones and LaunchPad Todd B. Rubin Diversity and Inclusion Scholar Andrew Kim are curating them. Register here
Four Syracuse University student startups and one alum team have gone through Techstars accelerators to build impressive success stories. Could you be next? If you are a disciplined and driven startup, chat with the Syracuse LaunchPad about Techstars and explore accelerators now accepting applications.
Techstars accelerators have one goal: To help entrepreneurs succeed. During the immersive three-month accelerator programs, Techstars surrounds companies with the best mentors and an unrivaled network investors, corporate partners and alumni founders. It provides early stage startups with:
Techstars is a proven model that’s helped build thousands of successful companies, all over the world.
Interested in joining a three-month accelerator to gain funding, mentorship, and access to the Techstars network for life? Applications open six times a year, and stay open typically for 12 weeks. The next round is now opening.
After applications close, Techstars will review applications for about seven weeks, and spend time getting to know even more about your team, market, progress and idea. The goal is to notify the final group of companies being accepted within eight weeks from the application closing date.
Many programs are now running virtually, some are hybrid and others are in person.
Check out Techstars accelerators accepting applications.
Learn more about Techstars here.
Before you apply, be sure to chat with the LaunchPad team in Bird Library for advice on what makes for a successful Techstars candidate and for assistance with an application.
Syracuse student students who have gone through a Techstars program include:
Syracuse alum Sandra Appiah Babu-Boateng recently completed Techstars Boston
Four Syracuse LaunchPad teams have moved on to the national round of the Blackstone Charitable Foundation’s IDEAS Competition, along with top winners from 50+ Blackstone LaunchPad campuses. Four national winners will each receive $10,000 for the best ideas across the network in the categories of social and climate impact, health and life sciences, consumer products services, and general.
Syracuse University winners who moved on to the national round each received $1,000 in the campus qualifying competition. They are:
Student teams will submit slide decks in the national round, which will be reviewed by judges. The four national winners will be announced on December 6.
Hours of studying, networking, writing cover letters, and practicing interviews is something college students work tirelessly at for one purpose: getting their first job after graduation. However, when that offer letter comes in and that first day of work arrives after graduation; it can be hard to adjust from the world of classrooms and papers to offices and project reports. Full-time jobs, particularly corporate jobs, often throw one into a completely foreign world with different language, workflows, and expectations.
Sandra Appiah Babu-Boateng, 2010 graduate from the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications hopes to prepare students and graduates to thrive in their newfound professional world. Through LegacyShift, a network platform that smart-matches members for skills training, mentorship, and career support, she is attempting to change the system so that entering the workforce is a smooth transition, not a jarring adjustment.
Babu-Boateng’s drive for starting LegacyShift comes from her own experience entering the workforce after she graduated from Syracuse University. As she grew up in a family of immigrants, working tirelessly to pursue her dreams and create a rewarding and enriching career for herself was at the center of her drive to succeed while in college. However, thriving in her career was not as straightforward as she believed it to be. “This was my American dream, but I got there and realized that hard work was not enough,” said Appiah Babu-Boateng.
Once in her job, she found that much of success in the workplace wasn’t related to simply hard work and focus, as much of success in school is. Instead, she found that successful careers demand excellent communication skills, navigating and collaborating with teams, and consistent networking and widening your support and professional circle. However, all these skills were not taught to Babu-Boateng through her college education, and she began to feel lost and burnt out navigating an unfamiliar professional system. “I felt more and more invisible and there wasn’t an easy way for me to find support internally,” she said of her time in her first job.
Babu-Boateng didn’t just see this struggle in herself, but also realized that many young professionals around her were struggling with the same feelings of skills gap, confusion, and inadequacy. Particularly for young people of color, professional workplaces can often be predominantly white and do not create welcoming and supportive spaces for individuals from diverse backgrounds. Babu-Boateng decided she wanted to change this harsh environment.
Babu-Boateng recognized the importance of mentorship and coaching as a catalyst for life and career success but saw inefficiencies and biases around how organizations run and manage these programs. She built LegacyShift to help organizations automate and streamline these programs so they can operate them at scale and more democratically. Organizations can use the platform to set up internal mentorship networks, create professional development courses, and use data analytics to understand skill gaps and how they can improve these programs. What excites Babu-Boateng the most is how LegacyShift is helping universities engage their alumni network to provide mentorship and coaching to students so they can be better prepared for the next stage of their life. Reflecting on her early experience in corporate world, “this is something that would have been a life changer for me,” she says.
The core of LegacyShift’s work is helping professionals to not only succeed in their careers but helping companies to support their workers. Appiah references that lack of growth and opportunity are the leading reasons people are switching jobs or searching for different industries post-pandemic. This is not the same thing as individuals truly hating their jobs, but searching for spaces where they can continue to grow, learn new skills, and advance. “The Great Resignation is turning into the Great Regret- the grass is not greener on the other side,” said Babu-Boateng of the current marketplace shifts. She hopes that LegacyShift will help companies and organizations effectively leverage their own internal talent to hone new skills, elevate and inspire their members at scale. She currently invites organizations to join LegacyShift’s waitlist here.
In thinking about the success of companies and organizations, Babu-Boateng highlights that at the end of the day, all success stems directly from humans. People are the driving force and visionaries behind all work and accomplishment. To create successful businesses and meaningful careers, companies and individuals need to invest in professional development and creating systems of support. “It’s critical to have people who are sharing experiences with you, teaching you, and helping you navigate specific experiences. We will be the #1 solution for human centered learning and development which will become critical for organizations, particularly those who want to win the “war” for talent,” said Babu-Boateng of LegacyShift’s impact on the professional world.
Babu-Boateng recently completed Techstars Boston. She invites any investors, organizations, or companies interested in learning more to reach out at contact@legacyshift.com.
The Syracuse University Blackstone LaunchPad is currently one of the first beta users of the platform, with peer mentors on the system. Students interested in trying out the platform to match with a Syracuse LaunchPad mentor should reach out to the LaunchPad by e-mailing LaunchPad@syr.edu
Story by LaunchPad Global Fellow Claire Howard ’23; photo supplied
Sam Hollander ’21 and James LePage ’22, co-founders of ShareClub, have been selected to be part of retail technology and consumer goods venture firm and startup accelerator, XRC Labs. They will join 12 other pre-seed startups spanning healthcare, beauty, sustainability, physical goods and more. As part of the accelerator program, each startup receives one to three hundred thousand dollars in startup capital from XRC’s Accelerator Fund and participates in a three-month-long bootcamp aimed to help grow their businesses. The startups are paired with mentors from XRC’s 330+ mentorship network and are provided access to XRC’s world-class partners.
Hollander (Whitman/Newhouse) and LePage (Whitman) created their company while serving as Rubin Family Innovation Mentors and team members of the Blackstone LaunchPad at Syracuse. They most recently won grand prize in Whitman’s Orange Tank competition. Hollander was program manager for the Syracuse LaunchPad before moving to work full-time developing ShareClub.
ShareClub is a platform for public, consumer-focused companies that leverages shareholder rewards to tighten the connection between loyal customers and retail shareholders. On average a retail shareholder will direct 74% more of their wallet toward their invested brands.
“The momentum and excitement at XRC are palpable with our growth this year in both our team and record number startup investments,” says XRC Partner, Diana Melencio, who joined XRC in 2021 to lead investments and was recently named a 2022 New York Business Journal Woman of Influence. “We remain committed to our investment philosophy by investing in incredible retail tech and consumer founders, while expanding our digital health portfolio, as we see this sector as exciting and ripe for innovation.”
XRC Labs is a New York based accelerator for the next generation of disruptors in the retail and consumer goods sectors. The venture capital firm and accelerator seek out the next generation of disruptors in the retail technology, consumer goods and consumerization of healthcare sectors. With support from our world-class retailer and brand sponsors including The Estée Lauder Companies, Mastercard, The TJX Companies and GS1 US, and our distinguished university and eco-system partners, XRC Labs has become the first design-centric retail innovation ecosystem of its kind.
With two Accelerator programs each year, XRC invests has invested in more than 130 companies since its inception in 2016.