The Metro Innovation Team
Founded in 2009, Metro Innovation is home to former venture capital investors, tech transfer professionals, designers, technologists, and strategy consultants. With over 20 combined start-ups under our belt, this team is committed to getting things going. Creating companies, finding technology, fostering community – and achieving results.
Our Mission
Constant Brainstorm
Our mission is to progress high quality ideas into realities for a better world.
We do this by developing unique programs that appeal to hard-to-find groups like aspiring entrepreneurs and inventors. These programs enable us to help communities unlock latent intellectual property assets and create connections between entrepreneurs and local start-up resources. Our clients are foundations, VCs, angel investors, tech incubators, and other community organizations with scarce marketing resources. We pool these scarce resources to produce programs that maximize community impact by utilizing unique economic and social incentives to increase participation in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, commercializing more technologies, creating companies, jobs, and civic wealth.
We boldly go where no venture capital investor or corporate development professional would ever go – and find the most amazing things. Like Cortez, Columbus, and Captain Kirk – we are the explorers of a new world of technology.
How We Began
Cincinnati, OH
At Metro Innovation, we are all products of creative and metrics-driven environments. Ultimately, we are problem-solvers. The problem? An inefficient capital market - venture capital - and an impossible-to-identify group - aspiring entrepreneurs.
As venture capital investors and economic developers, we realized that there had to be a better way to find the technologies and start-up companies that would drive the long term economic growth of our region. So we started creating initiatives – InOneWeekend, Cincinnati Innovates, and others – to get aspiring start-up CEOs and CTOs involved in the start-up ecosystem in Cincinnati early – and engage them with relevant events that would help them progress their ideas into reality. And it worked!
And we had so much fun doing it that we wanted to take it on the road - to the cities where we grew up and to our favorite cities around the world. We learned a lot. And what we learned, we built into our technologies and processes. And we’re still learning.
