Published in the Independence Daily Reporter, May 3, 2017

Entrepreneurs have a special way of viewing problems as opportunities. They look at life as an opportunity to solve problems for others in new and innovative ways. They realize making life better for others in turn makes life better for them. Think for a moment about the philosophy of solving problems to help others in innovative ways. Isn’t that what we’re all supposed to be doing? Whether in business for ourselves or working for others, in businesses, governments or community organizations, we’re all supposed to be solving problems to help others.

When we speak of entrepreneurial mindset or the Fab Lab ICC experience, we’re really talking about a different way of thinking for people of all ages and from all walks of life. If we could all think in terms of solving problems for others, our communities would become even better places to live, work and play.

Once or twice each year, in addition to all the activities at Fab Lab ICC, we offer a “class” (it’s very different from any class you’ve ever experienced) in Entrepreneurial Mindset. We use a revolutionary approach called the “Ice House Entrepreneurship Program” to help instill this kind of thinking. We look at interviews with successful entrepreneurs from all over the world as a way to begin to understand how they think. We bring in some of our great local and area entrepreneurs to tell their stories. We find some common threads in the thinking of these entrepreneurs, many of them ordinary people that are doing extraordinary things.

Ice House is organized around eight of these common threads referred to as eight life’s lessons. Think about what our communities would be like if everyone ascribed to these eight principles.

1. The Power to Choose: Life is not a lottery. We learn to recognize that our choices not our circumstances will ultimately shape our lives.
2. Recognizing Opportunities: Problems are often opportunities in disguise. Entrepreneurs are problem solvers and the secret to their success lies in their ability to identify problems and find solutions.
3. Ideas Into Action: Think big. Start small. Act fast. Entrepreneurs are action oriented and they tend to focus their time and energy on things they can change rather than things they cannot.
4. Pursuit of Knowledge: Our effort can only take us as far as our understanding. Entrepreneurs are self-directed, life-long learners who understand the power of knowledge combined with effort.
5. Creating Wealth: Spending or investing? For most, it’s not the lack of money that prevents us from prospering. Entrepreneurs manage their expenses, handle credit and leverage their abilities to create sustainable wealth.
6. Building Your Brand: Actions speak louder than words. Entrepreneurs are problem solvers and reliability is the key to their success.
7. Creating Community: Entrepreneurs understand the power of positive influence and they learn to surround themselves with others who have been where they intend to go.
8. The Power of Persistence: Entrepreneurship is not “get rich quick” and expecting it to be easy is a mistake. The “secret” behind every entrepreneur’s success is hard work, perseverance and determination.

We believe that instilling this mindset in small, rural communities is essential in order to create an environment in each one where businesses and organizations can grow and prosper, thus attracting people to make the communities grow and prosper.

The next Entrepreneurial Mindset class at Fab Lab ICC will begin on August 17 on Wednesday evenings from 6:30 to 8:00.

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter, April 26, 2017

Each year, when a president or a congress releases a proposed budget, if there’s any reduction to government spending for “science,” there’s a clamor about not supporting science with the implication that scientific research will come to a halt without said government funding. For the first 160 years or so of America’s existence the bulk of scientific discovery came about by tinkerers and small companies. Starting roughly with World War II, the government became more and more involved with scientific discovery, most notably the development of atomic weapons and energy. After the war, as Russia went from ally to adversary, the involvement of government in scientific discovery continued, much of it weapon related.

In January, 1961, in his farewell address to the nation on the advent of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, Dwight Eisenhower warned that the institution of science had become intertwined with our military institutions in an unhealthy way. Eisenhower used a term “Military Industrial Complex” (MIC) to describe this phenomenon of science and military combined. In the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, he said that while the nation must be secure there was a danger that MIC might have undue influence over the allocation of the nation’s resources, spending too much on science and defense. He also said that science was becoming so complex as to take it out of the garages of tinkerers and inventors and into large and expensive research and development departments both public and private.

Today, we enter another era as the Internet and other means of sharing information begins to put much of scientific discovery back in the hands of “digital tinkerers” in their garages and small shops indeed, some in Fab Labs and maker spaces.

There is disruption coming in the field of scientific discovery. In 2011, fourteen year old Easton LaChappelle of Mancos Colorado (population a bit above 1300) began working, in his bedroom, on a motorized prosthetic hand. He was not a scientist and he didn’t have a lot of money or any kind of government funding. Yet, in five years, at nineteen, he released the plans for his thought-powered robotic hand to “open source,” meaning anyone could use or springboard from his technology. His hand cost $350 to build as compared to tens of thousands for a conventional prosthetic hand.

For many scientific discoveries, gone are the days when we can afford to take six to eight years in development. Today’s entrepreneurs and tinkerers measure their time to discovery in a matter of weeks or months instead of years. There will always be a need for government participation and sponsorship to foster scientific discovery, but many research institutions, both in government and in large industrial firms, have become bureaucratic and complacent. The rest of us have to learn to work with constrained resources. In fact, constrained resources have led to some of the greatest discoveries of our time. There’s no reason science can’t survive a cut of ten to thirty percent in government spending. The entrepreneurs and tech start-ups can make the discoveries in less time and for less money.

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter April 19, 2017

One of the first things many small business owners say they need is more marketing or help with marketing. For most, better marketing promises to be the key for more sales, hence better profits and a more successful business. Yet for many businesses, actually whether new and small or older and bigger, more marketing is not really what they need; right now.

Have you ever gone to a restaurant’s grand opening only to be greatly disappointed with the overall experience? Many times a well-meaning manager or owner, of a restaurant or other type of business, will go to great lengths to market a grand opening that corresponds closely to the opening day of the business. The marketing efforts include press releases, advertising, email blasts by the local Chamber and, of course, a big effort to spread the word on social media. The big event comes and employees are overwhelmed by the crowds that result from the marketing efforts. The crowd of customers is disappointed as the business fails to meet, let alone exceed their expectations. A great marketing effort at this time, results in three to five times as many people being disappointed as compared to a “soft” grand opening without all the buzz and fanfare. Future marketing efforts have to be three to five times bigger and more expensive, to attract all those customers disappointed by the initial grand opening effort.

What the business above needed was not more marketing, but a chance to figure out how to create the positive customer experience; excellence in quality and service. A “soft” opening, maybe inviting a very few friends and family members, would give restaurant owners and staff a chance to work out logistical kinks in service without disappointing a large population of new customers.

I’m not just picking on restaurants. Many businesses, of all types and sizes, go to great lengths to bring in new customers while they don’t have their processes in place to insure the exceptional customer experience. Larger companies and institutions, have marketing and sales departments whose goals are to bring customers in the door, whether or not the production side of the house is ready to serve them. A perfect example is the cellular and communications companies. They are all great at marketing but many are not so great at delivering the customer promise.

Sometimes people coming to Fab Lab ICC for the first time will say something like “So many people don’t know about this Fab Lab. You need more marketing to get the word out.” I always thank them but then say we are happy with the organic growth in membership resulting by word-of-mouth. We want to work to develop and tweak our processes to improve the member experience before doing more marketing to bring in more members.

So, most businesses need more marketing at some point, but we all should be working to improve the customer experience so that when our increased marketing efforts bring in new customers they won’t be disappointed.

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.

Published in the Independence Daily Reporter April 12, 2017

The question is fairly common “How did this place come about?” We probably don’t tell the story often enough. Prompted by the grant application for our new building, I just finished summarizing how Fab Lab ICC got its start, then one of only 200 members of the International Fab Lab Network in the world, and at the smallest community college in Kansas.

Fab Lab ICC opened on October 1, 2014, seven months after ICC president Dan Barwick and I met and made the go no/go decision to move forward. Discussions with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation head of entrepreneurship, Thom Ruhe, began in October of 2013 the night before the annual conference of the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship (NACCE) in Charlotte, NC. In that conversation, Thom challenged me to ask Kauffman for a $50,000 match grant to purchase most of the new equipment. We subscribed to the charter of the International Fab Lab Network, spawned after the start of Fab (fabrication) Labs by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2000. To belong to the International Fab Lab network, the charter requires that the Fab Lab be available to the community.

I began talking about a Fab Lab or maker space early in 2012 after an inspirational experience at the NACCE conference in October of 2011 in Portland Oregon. In the beginning, most of the talking took place during our Monday “Entrepreneurs Brown Bag Lunch” series initiated in November of 2011. We began speaking in the affirmative that we would have a Fab Lab someday. In the beginning, we didn’t know if it would be a part of the college—academia is sometimes slow to accept new ideas– or be community based, as is Fab Lab Tulsa. Dan Barwick was one of the first at ICC, early in 2013, to see the potential of having a Fab Lab on campus.

Fab Lab ICC is located in what is known, for now, as the Cessna Learning Center, a training facility of 8,000 square feet built in 1996 for employees working in the new Cessna small business jet plant constructed at the Independence Municipal Airport. ICC collaborated with Cessna to provide much of the training. In return, when the building was no longer needed by Cessna (about five years ago) building ownership passed to ICC. Classes were scheduled in the two large classrooms of the building, but the 1,800 square foot shop area was not used. The shop space was well-suited for Fab Lab ICC with heavy duty electrical wiring and plumbing for compressed air already in place.

It wasn’t long after opening that the shop space, which looked big as we repainted an empty room, started becoming crowded. Fab Lab ICC now occupies the west classroom (1600 square feet) in addition to the shop space.

Today, as we approach 8,000 visitors since we opened only two and one-half years ago, we are planning an additional building of another 8,000 square feet. The results we see in people from all walks of life using Fab Lab ICC have been remarkable. We hope that other rural communities in Kansas and the Mid-West will take notice and initiate maker spaces in all small towns. They don’t all have to be as big as ours; a laser and a 3D printer in the local library or community center would be a great way to start.

Jim Correll is the director at Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu.