Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas

The core Fab Lab ICC team returned from a conference recently chock full, overflowing, with new ideas about how to improve the programming and services for our Fab Lab ICC members and stakeholders. The National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE) is one of the most entrepreneurial and fastest growing organizations in the United States. I think I joined NACCE circa 2008 and attended the first national conference in 2009.

Making Community Colleges More Entrepreneurial

NACCE has always been about helping community colleges figure out how to be more entrepreneurial, from the way they operate to the way they try to provide education and training for entrepreneurs. It’s been a great organization and I can trace all of my major advancements in fostering entrepreneurship to the knowledge I’ve learned and relationships I’ve developed through my involvement in this group. At NACCE 2011, I learned about the revolutionary Ice House entrepreneurship program. At NACCE 2013, a chance meeting set the stage for what led to the initial Fab Lab ICC funding from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City.

In 2013, in a NACCE break out session, I presented the idea that community colleges should make their technical programs more entrepreneurial and use a Fab Lab or maker space to help do so. I found that many people at this conference in Charlotte, North Carolina either didn’t know about the Fab Lab movement or were unsure of what Fab Labs and maker spaces were.

The good news today is that NACCE is heavily involved in the “Maker Movement.” The challenging news is that most people have not been introduced to the potential of Fab Labs and maker spaces to help with business development although many community colleges are engaged in activities toward inspiring business start-ups and growth. Nearly all of the people I spoke to at NACCE 2018 know about Fab Labs and maker spaces. Many have them on their campuses. But, many think the main offering for businesses is the ability to prototype new products therefor not necessarily helpful for the majority of their entrepreneurs and small business constituents.

Aids for Small Business Owners

From the beginning, we’ve worked to have equipment and services available through Fab Lab ICC to help entrepreneurs and small business owners start and grow their businesses in many ways besides just prototyping new products. We will continue our efforts to inform people locally and around the country about how Fab Labs and maker spaces can help businesses grow.

We have a nice laser printer members can use to print flyers, business cards, brochures, signs and placards. There’s a real estate agent that regularly uses this printer to produce property flyers to mail to his customer list. Tabatha Snodgrass uses this printer for a variety Independence Main Street printed items. For both of these examples, printing at Fab Lab ICC provides a higher quality and lower cost than is possible with their ink jet printers common in small businesses.

We have a wide media solvent-based printer members can use to print banners, adhesive vinyl, vehicle and wall wraps, decals and stickers, posters and even flags. Solvent based technology provides saturated color that is fade and weather resistant. We regularly have small business owners using this printer. For those too busy to use the printer themselves, we have entrepreneurs willing to do the work for them as a business service.

We have a plasma cutting table that can be used to cut sheet metal for use in signs and wall decorations. Our lasers can be used to etch promotional items like glasses, plaques and awards. We have a paper cutter that will cut a stack of paper at once. We have equipment that can be used for recording pod casts and videos. We just took delivery on an embroidery machine that can be used to add logos and names to apparel and caps. We’ll soon have a button machine to make promotional pin-on and campaign buttons.

More Than High Tech Prototyping

In short, besides all the high tech prototyping tools like 3D printing and scanning, we strive to have a collection of tools entrepreneurs and small business owners can use to start and grow their businesses. We try to choose tools such that are beyond the reach of many small businesses due to size and/or expense to own. Fab Labs and makers spaces have a huge potential in aiding small business development.

 

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.

 

Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas

We recently cut the ribbon to our Fab Lab ICC expansion building, an additional 7,000 square feet of maker space. It includes the “Entrepreneurs Bullpen” an open collaboration business incubator and the Equity Bank Digital Design Studio for our wide and 3D printing, vinyl cutting and electronics lab. A large shop will provide space for two or three welding stations, a paint booth and some large work benches donation by Kustom Signal in Chanute.

The ribbon cutting coincided with our fourth birthday. What started out as 1,800 square feet of maker space has grown to 15,000 square feet in four years; we believe it to be the largest maker space in markets of 50,000 or fewer people.

Surprising Growth in Four Years

People sometimes ask how we’ve grown and accomplished so much in 4 years. What has happened here surprises all of us. I believe we’re just now starting to figure it out. For one thing we’ve had a lot of help along the way but it’s still amazing.

In the beginning, we looked at our mission as helping people learn to make things; not only serious, high tech prototype things for business, but also fun things. Soon after we opened, we began to see the positive psychological effects of making things. Some people were affected in small fun ways. For some people the effects were life-changing.

We saw improvements in self-efficacy, a self-empowerment sort of self-confidence leading to better problem solving ability. Self-efficacy doesn’t separate work and career from family and personal life. Thus self-efficacy affects all aspects of one’s life.

About 2 1/2 years ago we changed the way we thought about our mission to one of improving the self-efficacy of those experiencing Fab Lab ICC. It was also about this time, in March of 2016 we first wrote our vision for a new facility in the form of an open letter entitled “What We Would Do with $500,000” (I wish we had titled it “What We Would Do with $1M.”)

A Change in Mission

When speaking of self-efficacy, most of the time we have to stop to define it as a special kind of self-confidence. In further pondering of this mission of increased self-efficacy, it is now clear that self-efficacy redefines what people see in their future. Some see the future only slightly different, as one where they can make and do things they didn’t know they could do. For others, the redefinition is profound.

Here are but examples of what we’ve observed.

* A grandmother who didn’t think she could learn the machines, makes etched glasses for her granddaughter’s wedding rehearsal dinner.

* A college athlete felt isolated among his peers because of his aspirations realizes that people in a Fab Lab have aspirations. Not everyone settles for what they are dealt.

* A marketing professional launches her own business after losing her job as the local hospital closes.

* A cosmetologist who thought she only knew about hair makes her own exterior sign and window vinyl to better promote her business.

* A developmentally challenged young man transitions from introvert, hating computers to extrovert, especially when designing his next project.

* A GED graduate works his way through the product development cycle of a new kind of interlocking building block.

* A downtown business owner saves hundreds by making and installing his exterior sign letters and graphics.

* Ninety middle school girls at STEM camp discover they really do like math and science. Many see a future potential they didn’t see before.

* Two full-time working women first decide they should be showing other women how to use the Fab Lab then got so busy with custom work they buy their own laser and printer.

* A farm mom fulfills customer orders for several months in the Lab before remodeling her home to accommodate her new laser, then remodels again after running out of room.

Funders, foundations, government agencies and others trying to make the world a better place like seeing these changes in the way people think; kind of an entrepreneurial mindset, helping people of all ages and all walks of life become better problem solvers. When they see what’s happening here, they want to share resources to help us continue.

Some have called me “visionary.” While it’s true that I believed if we built a Fab Lab, people would come and use it, there’s no way I could have envisioned what has taken place in these four short years. Lesson: Make your plans, dreams and aspirations flexible.

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.

 

Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas

We recently hosted what we call “Community Boot Camp; How to Build a Fab Lab from Ground Zero.” e Eleven people from around Kansas came to Fab Lab ICC for two and one-half days to learn from our journey in building our lab starting with verbal and written goals back in 2012. Their goal was to go home and work to initiate a Fab Lab or maker space in their communities. Steve came from Rooks County in Northwest Kansas; that’s about as far away as you can get and still be in Kansas. In this camp, all were involved in local E-Community initiatives. E-Community is part of Network Kansas with a goal of helping the local economy grow by offering gap financing, entrepreneurship education and other programs to help businesses start and grow. I think it was Wednesday afternoon, the second day, that we realized the powerful combination of Fab Lab capabilities with the E-Community offerings.

 

Fab Lab ICC is available to community members, entrepreneurs and small business owners for an annual membership fee of just $125. Fab Lab ICC is a creative place where things can be made for fun, learning or business purposes. Here, we explore some of the ways the Fab Lab ICC experience impacts our broader community and surrounding area. Fab Lab ICC is a regional resource available with no geographic restrictions.

 

• We work toward a continuous flow of new business start-ups while existing entrepreneurs and small business owners learn that they can use the Lab to develop new products and services. This adds jobs as some grow to need help. Every entrepreneur that becomes a start-up business counts as either a part-time or full time job.
• Entrepreneurs can use our tools to create promotional items such as banners, flyers, brochures, photographic and video imaging as well as gifts and awards. All at a reasonable cost. There are entrepreneurs and freelancers to help with much of this.
• We inspire an Entrepreneurial Mindset through everything we do, including the Mindset class and the initiation of the Youth Entrepreneur curriculum in area high schools. As this culture of Entrepreneurial Mindset develops, our communities become better at solving the problems facing rural communities in Southeast Kansas.
• Even in our youth Boot and STEM Camps, we talk about solving problems and that the best problem solvers and critical thinkers will have the best lives. The best way to have a happy, fulfilling life is to help others.
• We can help challenged individuals improve their quality of life. We discovered this by accident. Some will become entrepreneurs, experiencing for the first time in their lives, the joy of providing a product or service in exchange for money. Government and foundation agencies around the U.S. are looking for quality of life solutions for these populations. We are working with two local agencies to develop solutions through the Fab Lab experience.
• Through our Growth Accelerator program small business owners receive coaching and facilitation of E-Community gap financing and other services.
• We’re creating the work force training (we like to call it “Fab-Force”) that is required to thrive in the coming age of customized manufacturing made possible by automation, robotics and advanced electronics. We believe the training for the employees and contractors of the future should consist of an approach where participants receive an introduction to a variety of disciplines rather than the singular disciplinary approaches of the past.
• We strive to function as a type of advance manufacturing Lab where existing businesses can learn about new techniques in customization and automation.
• Fab Lab ICC does a share of the heavy lifting in making Independence Community College strong. A strong community college helps build a strong community.
• The Fab Lab culture has a positive effect on attracting youth to the area. That kind of Entrepreneurial-Fab Lab culture, based on technology, innovation and entrepreneurship never gets old or goes out of style. Young people like that kind of environment and will be attracted to return to the area as the quality of “city life” continues to deteriorate.

 

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.

 

Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas

Since I started working with entrepreneurs and small business owners in 2006, the idea of business incubation has seen ebb and flow popularity. When I first heard of it, the idea was to set up small spaces where start-ups could start and grow to a point they’d be ready to move out of the incubator to their own space. Some incubators have time limits. If you’re a new business, you may only have a year or two before you have to move out. Once, in those early days, I toured an incubator at a university that was essentially a room partitioned off into maybe a dozen cubicles. Although there was a certain electricity in the air, once seated in your cubicle, you were pretty much isolated from the others working to grow their businesses.

Reduced Cost in Launching a Business

The idea of the incubator was—and is—to make it easier and less expensive to launch and grow a business. A sliding rent scale over the first year or two, sometimes starting at no rent for a few months, ramping up to full rent after the first year or two, was supposed to be the incentive to inspire people to start businesses. There are a lot of expenses and other considerations to starting a business and reduced rent, while being a nice incentive, did not make people run out and start new businesses.

More than Just Low-price Rent

For retail businesses, the incubator is only good if the location is good for the business. We were involved in a good partnership with the city of Independence to use the iMall at 325 N. Penn as a business incubator a few years ago. The city rehabilitated the building and we offered the sliding rent scale to new businesses. While I’m not sure we attracted many people to start businesses, the arrangement was very helpful for several tenants that had already just started their businesses. A couple of years ago, some of the tenants went together and purchased the building. Today, although no longer an incubator, all spaces are rented and there is likely more foot traffic into the iMall than just about any other building in downtown Independence.

A More Holistic Approach to Starting a Business

Our newest effort at business incubation will be in the expansion building at Fab Lab ICC. (We hope to be ready for move-in during October 2018.) This time, we’ll be using a class, Entrepreneurial Mindset, to help aspiring business owners develop and validate their market solutions and use Fab Lab ICC for prototyping and promotional materials. Individual business coaching will continue to be offered and for those that need space or a place to come and work on their businesses. On becoming a Fab Lab member, business owners can elect to become part of our Growth Accelerator, a collection of tools and coaching to help grow their businesses. Growth Accelerator members will have come and go access to the Bull Pen free of charge.

Bull Pen Allows for Prep to Enter the Game of the Marketplace

Those needing a more permanent work space, cubicle or even office can rent space to keep their stuff on a sliding scale. The analogy comes from the fact that in baseball, pitchers prepare and warm up for the game in the bull pen. In our Bull Pen, entrepreneurs will prepare and warm up for their entry into the marketplace.

The physical Bull Pen will feature an open collaboration design. We believe there are big advantages in the ways various members can network and collaborate with each other while working on their own businesses.

Inspiring people to start new businesses comes down to inspiring a change in mindset and self-empowerment. That’s what we’re doing with the Entrepreneurial Mindset class and the Fab Lab experience. The new Entrepreneurs Bullpen, coming in October of 2018, will extend that mindset change to a physical collaborative space for those that are ready to move their new business into this special location thus reclaiming their dining room tables, spare bedrooms and/or garages.

 

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.