By Greater OKC Chamber staff i2E, a nonprofit that focuses on growing innovative small businesses in Oklahoma and making a positive impact on the state’s economy, is celebrating its 20th year of investing in entrepreneurs to build successful high growth companies in the state. While i2E officially started in 1998, the need for its servicesRead more
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By Scott Meacham Copyright © 2017, The Oklahoma Publishing Co. Twenty years ago, when i2E (first known as the Oklahoma Technology Commercialization Center), came into being there wasn’t a startup scene in Oklahoma. The economy was all about oil and gas, and agriculture and commercial real estate. We had no venture capital. Most young peopleRead more
By Scott Meacham It’s always interesting to me how archetypal change in a state comes about. I’m talking of change that is so far-reaching and ultimately disruptive that it bores deep into a state’s DNA and puts that state on a different path. The evolution of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Oklahoma is a homegrown exampleRead more
By Scott Meacham Copyright © 2018, The Oklahoma Publishing Co. The status quo is always hard to overcome. I’ve been saying that a lot lately as our state battles through the budgetary issues that are dragging us down the rabbit hole. It’s a frustrating, dangerous time, that has left many of us shaking our heads.Read more
Contact: Sarah Seagraves, Senior VP for Marketing (405) 813-2403 or email sseagraves@i2E.org OKLAHOMA CITY — i2E, Inc., recently led an $889,000 investment round in Stillwater, OK-based MaxQ, a startup company that has developed proprietary insulated packaging systems for the blood supply chain and associated life science industries. MaxQ offers a comprehensive suite of validated, reusableRead more
Copyright © 2017, The Oklahoma Publishing Co. The winners of an annual competition evaluating the innovations and business plans of some of Oklahoma’s brightest graduate and undergraduate college students were made this month at the 2017 Love’s Entrepreneur’s Cup competition. This year, the Love’s Cup attracted a record number of students from learning institutions acrossRead more
By Jack Money Copyright © 2017, The Oklahoma Publishing Co. A startup technology or medical company based in Oklahoma needed real luck in finding the capital it needed to propel it into the big leagues before 1998. But then, i2E was created. And, during the following 19 years, state, federal and private money the organizationRead more
Scott Rollins, CEO of Selexys Pharmaceuticals/Oklahoman photo provided by OCAST By Jim Stafford Copyright © 2017, The Oklahoma Publishing Co. Selexys Pharmaceuticals president and CEO Scott Rollins reflected on the lessons learned in the wake of the richest transaction in the history of Oklahoma biosciences — the recent $665 million sale of Selexys to industryRead more
Oklahoma startups are cashing in By Jack Money Copyright © 2016, The Oklahoma Publishing Company Chalk up WeGoLook, LLC’s deal with Crawford & Co. as another success story for i2E and the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology. On Dec. 6, Crawford & Co. announced it would acquire an 85 percent membershipRead more
If you are in a decision-making position in an Oklahoma company, is there any reason you wouldn’t want to consider doing business with a startup? You might think that there’s too much risk with a startup. Personally, I like optimism and passion. I favor businesses that stretch, that run lean, and that focus on cashflow. And I like to be part of helping a new business grow. I bet when you think about it, you do too.
If you are in a decision-making position in an Oklahoma company, is there any reason you wouldn’t want to consider doing business with a startup? You might think that there’s too much risk with a startup. Personally, I like optimism and passion. I favor businesses that stretch, that run lean, and that focus on cashflow. And I like to be part of helping a new business grow. I bet when you think about it, you do too.
If you are in a decision-making position in an Oklahoma company, is there any reason you wouldn’t want to consider doing business with a startup? You might think that there’s too much risk with a startup. Personally, I like optimism and passion. I favor businesses that stretch, that run lean, and that focus on cashflow. And I like to be part of helping a new business grow. I bet when you think about it, you do too.
A global pharmaceutical company will pay up to $665 million for an Oklahoma City research firm that recently completed a large trial of a drug that treats pain among those with sickle cell disease.
If you are in a decision-making position in an Oklahoma company, is there any reason you wouldn’t want to consider doing business with a startup? You might think that there’s too much risk with a startup. Personally, I like optimism and passion. I favor businesses that stretch, that run lean, and that focus on cashflow. And I like to be part of helping a new business grow. I bet when you think about it, you do too.
TokenEx, a company founded in 2010, had won the 2016 Metro 50 Award. TokenEx was recognized as the Oklahoma City metro area’s No. 1 ranked company with three-year revenue growth of 578 percent. While it may have flown under the radar locally, TokenEx is having a major impact in the data protection industry.
What if established Oklahoma companies opened the door in a very deliberate way to the entrepreneurs and startups in our state? What if they became that special customer or supplier for an Oklahoma startup? i2E has a well-vetted portfolio of young businesses, some with customers that could act as a reference and some at an earlier stage. These are entrepreneurial firms with big ideas, groundbreaking solutions, and founding teams that are solving old problems with new ideas.
Gutenberg adapted the principles of the wine press and used it as the foundation of the first printing press. His innovation became a perfect example of a concept called exaptation, which is taking an existing idea and repurposing it for use as something else. That’s the concept behind Oklahoma City’s Exaptive, a startup with a mission to facilitate serendipity. Exaptive does that by enabling the manipulation of large amounts of data so that diverse, disparate data sets can be synthesized, analyzed, and used as the foundation for new ideas.
Many successful companies have some sort of dedicated innovation funding. Some companies prefer not to innovate internally and use innovation funds for acquisition of innovation developed outside the company. It seems to me that there is another path to corporate innovation that we could leverage more in this state — strategic partnerships between existing Oklahoma companies with startups that are developing leading edge technologies and solutions that solve problems of the company or its customers. When a company finds a startup (or more than one) that’s tackling a problem it wants to solve, becoming an early investor or strategic partner in that startup opens some interesting doors.
This state is always going to have to reconcile times of boom and bust until we reduce our collective dependence on oil and gas. We need investment from the state, but we also need creative participation from everybody else. There are Oklahoma corporations, initiatives, and people who get that and are doing something. One such business is Kimray, Inc., a world-class manufacturer of control equipment used extensively in oil and gas production around the globe.
