Beaver County Chamber of Commerce President Jack Manning’s March Message

Chamber Innovation and Entrepreneurship Committee Report

Education, entrepreneurs and community development are coming together through a new project in the city of Beaver Falls’ downtown corridor.

Beaver County leaders are creating a Beaver Valley Innovation Hub in Beaver Falls that will serve as a centralized location where entrepreneurs, small business owners and students can work together and have access to programming and local experts to foster community development.

 

 

Beaver County is home to nearly 12,000 entrepreneurs and small-business owners who need space to run their companies, and training and mentorship to help grow it.

The Beaver Valley Innovation Hub will fill that gap, providing the region with much-needed business expertise and co-working space, helping entrepreneurs do what they do best – build, transform and innovate.

Innovation hubs are most successful, and best able to catalyze change, when designed to meet the specific needs of the community. So, the Beaver County Chamber of Commerce’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Committee and Penn State Beaver commissioned a market analysis that found areas of clear demand in the region. Based on those findings, the hub will offer entrepreneurship programming, and will include coworking spaces, a business accelerator, and a digital maker space; other possibilities include after-school arts programs, job training and a community kitchen.

“The Beaver Valley Innovation Hub is an important Beaver County effort to which Penn State can bring resources,” Penn State Beaver’s Chancellor Jenifer Cushman said. “We are excited about working with our higher education partners towards cultural and economic development.”

Driving the programming in the Innovation Hub will be the Beaver Valley LaunchBox. In addition to entrepreneurship programming, the LaunchBox will coordinate a Bridges Advisory Group consisting of faculty and students from the Bridges and Pathways College Consortium (Community College of Beaver County, Geneva College, Penn State Beaver and Robert Morris University) that will provide free technical or creative support to local businesses.

The LaunchBox is part of the Invent Penn State effort, an initiative announced by President Eric Baron in January 2015. The concept of Invent Penn State was to enact Penn State’s land grant mission by creating collaborations between campuses and local businesses that would spur community development and job creation and foster student career success.

Currently housed in the Beaver County Chamber of commerce, the LaunchBox is already a resource for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Ashu Kumar, instructor of information sciences and technology at Penn State Beaver, is the director of the Launchbox.

“The LaunchBox offers no-cost training programs, workshops, mentorship, advisory services and microgrants,” Kumar said. “Our goals is to evangelize innovation and entrepreneurship in the community with an objective to spur economic development, job creation and campus-community collaboration.”

Hub leaders are exploring a partnership with the Beaver County libraries so that LaunchBox programming can be extended across the county through a hub and spoke model. In the coming year, the libraries and historical societies will also partner with Bridges and Pathways to engage our communities in conversations about where we have been, where we are, and where we would like to go. The common reading for both Bridges and Pathways and PA Cyber students in 2019-2020 will be Peter Block’s “Community: The Structure of Belonging,” and the educational institutions are planning events around the theme of community building during the academic year.

The libraries and historical societies will partner on the theme of community building for their events around “Beaver County Reads.” The hope is that Beaver County residents will engage with each other on envisioning a sustainable and prosperous future for our region.

This important community update is brought to you by Beaver Falls Municipal Authority, 1st Consultants, Strassburger, McKenna, Gutnick & Gefsky, Ambridge Regional Chamber of Commerce, Skerlec Contracting, and NovaCare!