Published in the Independence Daily Reporter May 2019

Industrial suppliers use a line card to show customers and prospects what lines of products they have to offer. Besides being a place where people can make things, Fab Lab ICC has become involved in several collaborations and partnerships in our first five years and people have asked for something that describes these various services, collaborations and partnerships.

Broader Mission

In the beginning, we created the Lab as a place where people could imagine, design and create almost anything. That is still true, but we’ve found that Lab activities have a very positive effect on self-efficacy, that special form of self-confidence leading people to make better decisions toward improving their lives. That discovery changed our mission which we think of now as; “FAB LAB ICC empowers the individual to satisfy the innate human need to solve problems. By imagining, we build hope. By designing, we innovate. By creating, we increase self-efficacy.”

Our “line” card of services, collaborations and partnerships.

Fab Lab and Maker Space

We are a community membership organization. Our ICC students, faculty and staff can become members at no charge. Individual memberships at $125 annually are the most popular with family and corporate memberships offering discounts for several members under “one roof.” Membership includes access to machines, capabilities and facilities with instruction.

Growth Accelerator

Members that are aspiring entrepreneurs and existing small business owners become part of the Growth Accelerator to access business coaching and special tools to help them grow in addition to discounts on materials purchased through the Lab.

Fab Advisor

This tool, available to Growth Accelerator members, is a method to create a customized, virtual advisory board that can be used to ask questions, bounce ideas and get feedback. The means of communication is a private forum on the Lab web site only accessible to the chosen members of a particular board.

Women 4 Women

The initial purpose of this initiative seeks to lower barriers to full or part-time business ownership by women. It has become a growing support network of women helping other women. Activities include some Lab maker events and some informational events for business and marketing. The effort is supported by a 2-year grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City.

Fab Force

Fab Force is an alternative technical certificate program for those who are not sure what vocational areas they wish to work. Curriculum revolves around a core set of courses to develop an entrepreneurial mindset as an effective approach to problem solving, conflict resolution and character. The rest of the certificate program includes a buffet of course work as an introduction to many technical disciplines.

Greenbush Special Programs

We co-host several initiatives that are part of Greenbush, formally known as the Southeast Kansas Educational Cooperative. During the school year, gifted students from seven area school districts descend on the Lab on Wednesdays to use our facility for project-based learning. In the summer months from June through mid-July, we co-host a series of week-long morning “boot camps” during which students do various projects in the Lab; make almost anything, robotics, and community solutions.

Verizon STEM Camp

Last summer, Fab Lab ICC became one of sixteen United States community colleges to receive a grant from the Verizon Foundation to allow up to 100 middle school girls to attend, without charge, a 3-week, full-day STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) camp. The girls learn lots of cool technology by doing 3D printing, vinyl cutting, virtual reality and coding. There’s also lots of hand work involved to improve manual dexterity. While they are all having fun, they are also peering into future possibilities for their life’s work.

Network Kansas E-Community

Before Fab Lab ICC, the Entrepreneurship program at ICC helped facilitate what is now known as the Montgomery County E-Community, part of a state organization called Network Kansas. The primary function of E-Community is to provide GAP financing for small business ventures and expansions in addition to conventional bank financing. To date, this E-Community effort has loaned out nearly $700,000 in low interest GAP financing.

Adult Basic Education

In January 2019, we invited the only Adult Basic Education (ABE) program remaining in Montgomery County to join us at the Lab so we could help instructor Dan Fossoy incorporate project-based learning in the efforts for these folks to get their belated GED (in our state known as the Kansas High School Diploma equivalent. Making projects shows the relevance of much of the math, reading and science the students have to know to pass their test. ICC has hosted ABE for years, but this pilot is the first effort to incorporate project-based learning.

We will post these summaries to our site and begin working to provide expanded details of each at http://www.fablabicc.org.

 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349, by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu or Twitter @jimcorrellks.

 

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter May 2019

An entrepreneurial mindset benefits everyone in all walks of life. Employees are better at adding value to their company if they think like entrepreneurs. For employees, especially those paid an hourly wage, starting a part- or full-time business; there is a specific aspect of the entrepreneurial mindset essential to their success. It’s one of the most difficult concepts to grasp-how to get the price of their products and or services “right.”

There are two areas where new entrepreneurs fall short in the art of pricing their products and services. The first is an error in strategy, the second, a shortcoming in the self-perceived value of their worth in the marketplace.

Many times, the budding entrepreneur will want to offer the best selection, best service and best experience at prices below those of the dreaded “box store.” The idea of offering great service is the best strategy for most products and services. The problem is that offering best selection, service and experience costs more to offer. The reasons the “box stores” generally have lousy service and experience is that their low prices won’t support great service and experience. So, box store shoppers have to accept the take-it-or-leave-it strategy. For a certain segment of the market, the low price/lousy service strategy is good enough. There’s a smaller but growing segment of people, tired of lousy service, who are willing to pay more if the combination of selection, service and experience are superb. Those are the people most of the new entrepreneurs should be targeting.

The second problem is that of self-worth. As employees, we become conditioned to the idea that we are being paid what we are worth and that the amount would apply whether we’re working for another company or we’re working for ourselves. If we’re making, say, $20 per hour at a job and, in a side business, it takes us one-hour to create an original art poster for a customer we think charging $20 is good enough. The problem is that when you’re on a job at $20 per hour, you are paid for each hour you work. In a business, you won’t be able to produce income for each hour that you work. You’ll have to spend time marketing, invoicing, cleaning up and doing all kinds of other activities. To further complicate the problem, some people have told me that to do something they love, they are willing to take less than their hourly wage. In 2005, a woman told me she’d be happy if she could make $5 – $6 per hour after all the bills were paid. One of two things will happen to these new entrepreneurs if their mindset doesn’t change. They will either go out of business, not able to pay their bills, or they will burn out after a few years, asking themselves “why am I doing all of this for no more money than that.”

A CPA in Garden City gave me some advice, a rule of thumb, in the early 1980’s that remains valid today. He said that when a CPA firm hires an accountant, they figure on charging their clients three times what they are paying the accountant; one third to pay the salary, one third to pay benefits and overhead, and one third for the benefit of the firm.

Using this rule of thumb, the price for the original artwork poster above (that took one hour to make) would be around $80; $20 for materials used and $60 for the time. The goal would be to use this price structure in the part-time business while keeping the “day job.” At a point when there is enough business you could be spending two-thirds of your time producing sales, it might be time to take the leap, quit your job and become a full-time entrepreneur and business owner.

 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349, by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu or Twitter @jimcorrellks.

 

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter May 2019

Some of you that have been in the county for a while will remember Brad Eilts. He was a previous executive director of Montgomery County Action. Council (MCAC.) Back in 2012. before Fab Lab ICC, he had helped us get a “jobs” grant by demonstrating how helping entrepreneurs could grow jobs in a local or regional economy. That grant was one of the first signals I can remember where a grantor was receptive to the idea that entrepreneurs, not just big companies, might become a major driver of the economy.

In the spring of 2012, Brad ask me to co-present with him at a Kansas League of Municipalities conference in Wichita. I had been involved with the City of Independence in incubating businesses in what is now known as the I-Mall building at 325 N Penn. I chose to talk about “10 Myths of Business Incubation.” When I asked Brad how long we’d have to present, he said “I didn’t think it would take very long so I told them 10 minutes for each of us.” Astounded, I replied “I can’t finish the introduction in 10 minutes.” I think he ended up getting us 30 minutes each. I like having time to fully unpack a topic and I like to use a lot of pictures.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago when Adult Basic Education (ABE) instructor, Dan Fossoy, asked me to provide opening remarks for the ABE graduation ceremony on May 4. It was a privilege to be asked. Even though just opening remarks, I wanted to use the remarks to give the graduates the secret to success. Readers of this column know we’ve become big advocates for the ABE program in helping people get their high school diplomas after not getting them in a conventional high school setting. There were twenty-two graduates since last year’s ceremony with eleven of them and 150 family members and friends attending this year’s ceremony. We brought ABE to the Lab last January so I’ve gotten to know several but not all of the ABE graduates. Many have quite a story about why they did not finish high school in the conventional way. Some learn in one of the eight or ten learning styles not taught in school, so they were branded as “slow,” dropping out from frustration. Some had personal and family situations that got in the way, some tragic. Yet, they persevered and obtaining the diploma is a huge deal for them, much more so than we realize.

I asked Dan how long I had to present my opening remarks and he said “Oh, four or five minutes.” Silently, I said to myself “What??? How am I going to tell them the secrets of success in only five minutes?”

I ended up sticking to my five minutes. I told the graduates I was going to give them the secret to a successful life and that they already had more than half of what is required. First thing is to decide to serve others, either directly as customers or through an employer, while doing something you enjoy. Second, is to be ready to be a life-long learner since our rapidly changing world will demand that everyone always learn more. The good news is that while more school may be part of the answer, there are lots of ways to learn besides school. Third and most important is to do what you say you are going to do and that the world, in the form of customers and employers is yearning to work with people that do what they say they will do. That’s it. Those three things will make anyone successful in life. Serving others, being a life-long learner and doing what you say you will do.

 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349, by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu or Twitter @jimcorrellks.

 

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter April 2019

Listening to the national media, one would think that the major urban areas like Silicon Valley in California and Boston have cornered the market on new innovations. Although population is certainly higher in many areas, there are innovators all over rural America. We just don’t hear as much about them. The Kansas Small Business Development Centers (KSBDC) would like to change that and, in our region, we’re going to help spread the word to celebrate and foster rural innovation. We at Fab Lab ICC are co-hosting an event called the Rural and Independent Innovators Conference on May 20 and 21 at ICC West. More on that at the end of this column.

A brief look at Google patent search shows that in this corner of Southeast Kansas, Montgomery County, patents were prolific in the period from about 1900 through the mid 1920’s. In all the years since then, there have been patents, but not at the break-neck pace of that first period. More about the reasons for that in a future column.

A partial list of those patents suggests a wide diversity of problems being solved. The last two are much later and I wish I had the resilient tire on my current riding mower. Here is a partial list of some of items in Google’s patent search for Montgomery County Kansas. Pump rig or jack, pressure valve, refrigerator, washing machine, fruit picker, ship construction, display rack, resilient tire, pencil holder, wire fence machine, arm rest for Jeep vehicle, live animal trap.

We now realize that a patent alone is no indicator of future market success. Except in the cases of the last two items on the list, we don’t know much about the commercial viability of the earlier items. Yet, just the volume over a few years in the early 20^th century says something about the rural innovator’s ability to invent solutions to current day problems. In the case of the Jeep arm rest, thousands were sold in a day when arm rests were not standard equipment. Inventor Doug Misch went on to invent and market dozens of after-market Jeep accessories over the next 40 years. He has since sold the company, Misch’s 4 x 5 Products, and continues innovating in other ways while also helping Fab Lab ICC members develop their innovations for possible release to the marketplace. The live trap was invented by Independence resident Dana Watson. In his case, being proprietor of the successful Watson Vending company, he sold a license for his trap to the corporation that owns Victor traps. His invention is marketed and sold world-wide.

Innovators are alive and well in rural American, many of them own and operate our family farms and small businesses. We should be doing all we can to “bring them out” and help them in any way we can to develop their products and bring them to the marketplace. That is the purpose of the Rural and Independent Innovators Conference (RIIC) initiated by KSBDC last January in Manhattan, Kansas. Lab manager Tim Hayes and I participated in this two-day event, sitting on panels to discuss how Fab Lab ICC can help with the prototyping and development of new products. The vision of KSBDC is to host regional RIICs around the state throughout the year with an overall statewide conference once each year. We at the Lab are pleased to be co-hosting the first of these regional RIICs on May 20 and 21 at ICC West. We hope to attract “closet” innovators that have had ideas on their heads for years, current innovators in various stages of coming to market and experienced innovators to tell the stories of their journeys to market. We also want to attract the practitioners that can help the innovators’ efforts; business coaches, technical consultants, patent advisors and financial people. There will be lots of networking and the “closet” innovators will see that the experienced innovators are just like them but made a decision to come out of the closet at some point in the past.

We’ll post an information link and path to register at fablabicc.org or search for RIIC on Facebook.

 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349, by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu or Twitter @jimcorrellks.