A Selection of Spark Growth Portfolio Projects

National Entrepreneur Center – Jerry Ross, speaking on Main Street Gardening for Global Entrepreneurship Week

3.0 Leaders Talk…Bright Spots in Education

Spark Growth – Stan Schultes, Friends of Global Entrepreneurship at U.S. State Department

Station 2 Innovation – cowork space

Spark Growth contributes to local entrepreneurship discussion at SB2

The United Nations launch of Women’s Entrepreneur Day, Sara Hand is introducing an award recipient.

Booker High School hosts a multi-generational introduction to Strategic Doing.

Station 2 Innovation organizes a Tampa Bay Regional Pow Wow. This group represents entrepreneur ecosystem leaders across the 8 county Tampa Bay Region.

Sara Hand visiting Tech Stars New York.

An introduction to Strategic Doing brings together community, education and business leaders at Tampa Bay WaVE.

Sara Hand, CEO of Spark Growth, speaks to the importance of collaboration at the 2015 Strategic Innovation Summit on the campus of Harvard University. Photo: Griffin Greenberg, NY Times

Startup Chicks visits Florida

3.0 Leaders is Access to Extraordinary Leaders and Innovators.

At Spark Growth – our passion is in connecting the dots – growing people, businesses, and communities.

We’re always looking for cool new ideas that make a difference, great people, and awesome partners for projects. These projects take shape across cultures, multiple time zones, industry clusters and profit and non-profit sectors, many are shown here in the Spark Growth portfolio. From the wild west of “Smart Cities”, the culture shifting aspects of thought-leadership workshop retreats and conferences, to the capital creation results of business and economic development.

Thought Leadership and Community Development:

Spark Growth Leaders Exchange – annually convening extraordinary global leaders and innovators, “heroes” in establishing innovation cultures to address the tough issues that are facing us all today. What are the latest trends? What questions should you be asking? Where are they investing their time and money, and why?
DaVinci’s Faire – multi-generational sensory-rich community engagement centered around science, technology, makers, inventors and lifelong learners in an unique open-spaces format.

Ecosystem Development:

Global Entrepreneur / Innovation – projects concerning entrepreneur ecosystem and Innovation as a Service around the world from the Middle East, to Africa, to Latin America.
Soft-landing services – supporting business expansion into new markets, designed specifically to ensure those businesses are provided with an accelerated introduction into their new market’s business practices, regulations and culture.
Agile strategies – lean, agile and fast, we teach people how to form collaborations quickly within in their networks, and rapidly generate innovative solutions in quick, iterative cycles. We’re certified in Strategic Doing by the Purdue Agile Strategy Lab.
Station 2 Innovation – building community and growing entrepreneurial businesses in our hometown of Bradenton, FL and beyond with coworking, business mentoring, weekly public education sessions and much more. We’re certified in Business Incubation Management by the International Business Innovation Association (InBIA).

Smart Cities & Innovation Districts:

Smart Cities Innovation Accelerators – coordinating a series of Accelerator programs with leading Smart Cities, an initiative of the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard (TECH). The Accelerators are intensive, 3-day collaborative learning and workshop sessions between C-level decision makers from top smart cities programs and a select group of industry influencers working together on common problems.
Smart Cities – are about building integrated technical systems to monitor and manage city-wide infrastructure, providing a more pleasant and efficient place for its citizens, utilizing citizen inputs.
Innovation Districts – development of creative, collaborative places to live, work and play. Innovation Districts are about creating local, self-contained economic development centers within larger metropolitan areas. We partner to define strategy and make great connections between cities, corporate innovators, and learning institutions.
Cool collaborations – from visiting the UN and State Department, to Future Ready Economy and Digital Life in Latin America sponsored by Harvard University, international business networking and impact investment conferences. We’re always looking to meet cool people that want to work on cool projects that make a difference.