Kevin Koym

Kevin and Tech Ranch Austin Partnering with Concordia University

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Kevin was featured in the Community Impact Newspaper for his work with Tech Ranch Austin and Concordia University in partnering to create the Incubator for Innovation & Impact.

“I am excited that the partnership with Concordia provides access to an untapped and fresh talent pool that can provide a new perspective not historically tied to the Austin startup community, creating a new opportunity for growth and impact,” Tech Ranch CEO Kevin Koym said in a news release.

This is a great opportunity for Kevin to collaborate with a new group of entrepreneurs to make the world a better place.

Challenging Conventions

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Seth Godin recently shared a short blog post about challenging conventions.  As innovators, we’re challenging convention all of the time… yet we must be consciously clear which conventions that we’re intending to challenge, and do this with a designer’s eye.  This is a great admonition- be careful to not break all of the eggs to make an omlette, only the eggs that you’re intending to do so, and that are needed to do so.

Challenging conventions is precisely what makes your thing new. Hence unconventional. The difficulty comes when you challenge conventions and defy expectations that you weren’t planning on upsetting. The inadvertent skipping of what we expect causes you to frustrate us, or to appear as an uncaring, unprepared amateur, or both.

via Seth’s Blog: Conventions and expectations.

What Blocks Creativity and Innovativeness?

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How do you help an entrepreneur (or anyone for that matter) be more innovative and creative?  You teach them to be vulnerable- vulnerable to failure by having them take risks.  Yet what blocks them from taking risks?  Dr. Brené Brown of the University of Houston Graduate School of Social Work says that it is shame that blocks individuals from being vulnerable, whether in personal relationships, or in the actions that they take- many times not risking “failure” because of these views.  In the following TED talk, she speaks of “the power of vulnerability“, explaining that although the emotion guilt produces the internal response in a person “I did a bad thing” versus shame producing the internal response “I am a bad person”.  The reason that this is so key is because in the shame example, the individual has no way to redress the situation, therefore feeling trapped, many times having the individual squelch their abilities in trying to compensate for being incomplete.  As well I could imagine this also has the opposite effect, of having individuals go too far in trying to compensate as well- going to the point of unhealthy results that we see associated with many startup companies as well.

Here’s a link to the video:

For a quicker synopsis, and a personal snapshot, online performer Ze Frank  produced a very personal snapshot of how shame blocks his own creativity.  Here’s a personal snapshot, a bit shorter, that shares similar insight:

In my work with entrepreneurs (and myself) what this says for how to help them overcome the internal blocks that block many times block the individual entrepreneur (and therefore the startup).  I would posit to say that most “failures” at the early stage in startup development are not for some external set of circumstances- but internal ones.  Entrepreneurs can pivot their startups to success around roadblocks… but they have to be internally prepared for  doing so as much as being prepared with external resources (e.g. technology and funding).

The Arduino Open Source Hardware Revolution is Coming!

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Around the Tech Ranch, we have recently had our first team launch a commercial startup based around the Arduino microcontroller.  What  is the Arduino?  Simply put, it is a microcontroller- a simple set of computer chips that are easy to program and configure for small projects- that either stand alone (e.g. like a robot) or are tied into other computers (e.g. like some external system tied to a computer).  The team that has launched the startup around Tech Ranch has not yet publicized their work… so I can’t tell you about that just yet… but it is exciting… for the “revolution” in this is that new hardware products can be made by entrepreneurs very inexpensively… allowing an ever increasing amount of innovation.

The following documentary gives a little bit of overview about the Arduino, including many projects that give you a flavor for the scope of this new technology platform.  Enjoy and imagine what you can build!  🙂 (and go build it!)

Arduino the Documentary

“Friday Evening Experiments” fetch Nobel Prize

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It doesn’t take much time to profoundly impact science and the world.  Dr. Konstantin Novoselov devoted 10% of his time to “crazy things that probably won’t pan out”. One of these experiments did… that he’s now being recognized with the Nobel Prize.

The style of Geims lab which Im keeping and supporting up to now is that we devote ten percent of our time to so-called “Friday evening” experiments. I just do all kinds of crazy things that probably won’t pan out at all, but if they do, it would be really surprising. Geim did frog levitation as one of these experiments, and then we did gecko tape together.

via Konstantin Novoselov Interview – Special Topic of Graphene – ScienceWatch.com.

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