creative economy : Innovation + Job News

An organization’s name needs to reflect its mission. New Rules does exactly that. The North Minneapolis for-profit/non-profit hybrid merges community event center, coworking office space, retail and, eventually, a café. At its core, the multi-prong concept blends creative enterprise, social entrepreneurship and community engagement, with a focus on improving and connecting the immediate community near its home on Lowry Avenue.

New Rules seeks to meet the needs of artistic creatives and small businesses while giving back to the local community. “It started with my love for community building and visualizing resources,” says founder Chris Webley. In speaking with artists, he saw a connection between the artisans’ needs and those of other small businesses. While fleshing out the New Rules concept, he realized it naturally extended to the North Minneapolis community where he wished to set up shop.

“We’re looking at ways of engaging different audiences and having conversations to help,” he explains. “The idea is that everybody is doing something. I cut the check, do the heavy-lifting,” he admits, then artisans create products in the work space and then sell them to the community through the retail store. “Everybody has something to contribute…we’re trying to get people to rally behind that idea.”

The event space is open to the community now, whether that means a neighborhood gathering or an art exhibit. Webley hopes to add a café later, which will then feed the community as well.

“Our niche is creative occupations,” he says, but it’s not limited by that mission. New Rules is adaptive based on who can help and what services they can offer.

To cater to creative industries, Webley wired a state-of-the-art sound system, and is actively seeking funds and donations from local corporations for other high-end equipment such as a 3D printer. “I’m gung-ho on doing things the right way the first time around,” says Webley, emphasizing that high-end equipment establishes a sense of pride and professionalism that patchwork gear cannot. New Rules seeks to invest in the community and to give back, which is why he wants the best technology he can find. 

Webley purchased the building himself and has overseen renovations. Though the coworking spaces are open now and the retail shop is running in a pilot mode since October 15, he considers New Rules a work in progress. The idea is fully formed and he’s built it from the ground-up, but there is room to grow.

Tenants will come, he says. Currently, he continues, “It’s more about getting the right things that are going to enable us to have an impact.” As the creative businesses grow, so will the retail store and the overall entity’s ability to reach out to their neighbors.

“The biggest needs for a lot of our immediate neighbors are financial resources,” Webley continues. By emphasizing sustainable leadership and economic development through an adaptive format, New Rules can improve lives directly. “There are many examples I can give you where the underlying factor is not having traditional limitations on how you can help,” he explains, “but getting creative.” He cites an example from last summer, when the building lent its lawnmower to a local homeless couple, who used it to earn funds for food and shelter.

By truly engaging their neighbors and finding unique solutions, Webley wants to achieve far more than a high-tech workspace for small businesses. He sees New Rules as connecting workers and neighbors, forging bonds that go beyond vocation.

The New Rules event center will be buzzing this February in honor of Black History Month, serving as a launch pad for the fully integrated concept. The cowork space will be upgraded and the retail store remodeled. “We’re not going to have everything that we want in terms of amenities,” Webley admits. “But we’re continuing to trek toward things.”
 

The Internet’s effect on the brick-and-mortar economy gets more pronounced each year. With new restaurant delivery services flocking to the Twin Cities and Amazon continuing to grow, the way that consumers shop for their food is also changing. With a redesigned website, CobornsDelivers is betting that now is the time to make its presence felt.

A subsidiary of Coborn’s Inc., the St. Cloud-based grocery store founded in 1921, CobornsDelivers began with the 2008 acquisition of SimonDelivers. With a name change and a connection to a Minnesota brick and mortar, the yellow CobornsDelivers trucks have been a regular site in the Twin Cities for the past 8 years.

“People come to us because they’re seeking convenience,” says e-commerce marketing manager Katie Boegel. “They stay with us because of our service.”

“We wanted to reintroduce ourselves to the Twin Cities market in a time when shopping online is more relevant than it was in 2008 when we first came here,” she further explains. The e-commerce company approached its web redesign the same way the company would remodel a physical store.

The emphasis was on mobile web use, and to make the process of buying groceries at home easier for both regular customers and first-time users by underscoring a navigation overhaul and better search and filtering options to speed up shopping. At the end, the checkout cart was a point of emphasis. Rolled out from May to September, the dividends already show. “Around 40 percent of our customers use their ‘Previously Purchased List,’” notes Boegel. The site is also seeing more mobile use.

Grocery delivery is popular for those with life changes: new disabilities, the elderly and new parents. But Coborn’s is hoping to extend its services all busy parents. Grocery delivery saves valuable time that can be reallocated to children or meeting other needs. It’s a new market and now is the time to forge those connections.

“The best practices that might work for the Amazons of the world aren’t always applicable to us,” Boegel stresses. There is a sensory and personal attachment to food. CobornsDelivers works hard to maintain that trust between computer, customer and neighborhood service reps (e.g. drivers).

“People have a tough time wrapping their mind around it: how fresh are your groceries really going to be; where are they coming from; and how are they getting to me? I think that’s easier for material goods like shoes or jeans,” she says of online shopping.

As a Minnesota based employee-owned company, she feels Coborns has a leg up on the competition. Drivers form bonds with customers through regular deliveries and "our warehouse model (which we call superstore) has real professional shoppers shopping for you very similarly to a grocery store," she adds. The company trains professional shoppers to pick out customer orders and select the freshest produce.

“They inspect your produce and we handpick every piece that goes in our orders,” she says. Though the process feels robotic to an online shopper, CobornsDelivers has over 200 employees, most of whom are on the delivery team or the shopping team. The company uses special internal software inside a superstore environment where employees fill multiple orders at once, before they are put into the big yellow delivery trucks.
 

Businesses begin with an idea, but also a motive. At Asiya, the idea is to provide sports hijabs that are culturally appropriate, yet comfortable and flexible enough to stay in place while young Muslim girls play sports. The motive is to encourage confidence and community in a segment of the population that’s been hesitant to participate.

Founded by Fatimah Hussein and Jamie Glover, Asiya’s mission is to use sports to inspire self-confidence and leadership skills that will carry into adult life. As a whole, Muslim girls are about 50 percent less likely to participate in sports than their peers in other religions. Asiya hopes to reverse that trend, starting with the uniform.

Muslim garments emphasize modesty while sacrificing the flexibility and comfort needed in athletics. Asiya’s active wear is designed to bridge the gap. It respects traditional norms but modifies the style and material to make more breathable clothing. The company is launching with three sports hijabs, all designed by local Muslim women. The response has exceeded expectation.

The company’s crowdfunding campaign closed at 152 percent of its goal, with orders and press from all over the world. Other sports hijabs are made in foreign countries and are less comfortable, Hussein explains. Asiya’s products are designed by women who wear them and understand the needs and feel.

The hijabs will be manufactured locally. “Our mission was always to be made in Minnesota,” she says, even before the funding campaign took off. Materials cost more locally, but making the hijabs at home decreases the cost of shipping and ensures ethical labor practices, Hussein says.

Asiya is currently producing its first run of hijabs, which are currently sold online. Hussein says swimwear and casual active wear like yoga pants and longer tunic shirts are on the horizon: clothes that any modest woman will want to wear, whether she’s a practicing Muslim or of another faith. She sees potential markets in college and university bookstores.

Ultimately, Asiya’s garments are about comfort, modesty and safety, but also strong. “I think a lot of girls are not playing sports because the encouragement is not there from a young age,” Hussein says, summarizing her goal for the business. “Now there is a product to make sure these girls can play just like any girl.”

She’s already received feedback from the local community who have tested her product. “The girls say they feel very confident: that it has made them play more fairly.”

That’s exactly the message Hussein wants to hear. As Asiya grows in the next year, Hussein plans to enlist brand ambassadors to spread that word worldwide. It’s not strictly a product that Asiya is selling, it is the idea that, with confidence, young girls can become leaders.
 
 

Since 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has ensured equal opportunity for Americans who suffer from physical and mental conditions that limit their means. While wheelchair ramps, closed captioning and wider doorways have become commonplace, the digital realm still lags behind.

Accessible360, founded by entrepreneur Mark Lacek, seeks to fix that oversight. The company’s purpose is to make websites and digital apps fully functional for those impaired by blindness, deafness, or physical or cognitive restrictions. The company was launched this April and began promotion last month, just in time to help businesses comply with a rollout of new regulations from the Department of Justice in 2018.

Technology has changed since 1990 when the ADA was passed, and the Department of Justice announced last year that it the law applies both to physical buildings as well as digital areas. Accessible360 is here to make companies accessible today.
Many screen readers don’t recognize 100 percent of a website, Lacek says. When a blind user can’t access an offer, it’s discrimination and a violation of the law. Some compliance issues are obvious, like font sizes that affect the visually impaired but, he says, most are subtle. “There are things you would never recognize as a sighted person. Technology just doesn’t pick them up.”

Checkout screens are a notorious problem for blind users, he explains, which alienates disabled users and decreases potential sales. Studies show that disabled Americans spend more time online than their non-disabled counterparts, so it’s essential for companies to adapt to their needs. “Up to 85 percent of websites are not compliant based on what the current ADA guidelines are,” says Lacek.

“It’s somewhat Y2Kish,” says Lacek, explaining digital ADA compliance. “There’s this pending thing on the horizon. The difference is everyone knew about Y2K and people are just becoming aware of this issue.”

Accessible360 offers three core services. Lacek’s team of 10— led by accessibility engineer Aaron Cannon (who is blind)—will provide an audit of a website to determine issues and potential fixes for a client. Other services are remediation (fixing the issues) and monitoring. Monitoring, he explains, works like a home security system or credit card alert program, where Accessible360 makes sure that any new content uploaded to a website remains in compliance even after the first two phases are complete.

“The biggest challenge is really awareness and education of the general public,” says Lacek. “A lot of people don’t realize that the ADA regulations applies to the internet and their sites need to be accessible.” The company was inspired by the number of lawsuits being filed about website accessibility.

So far, Lacek’s team has worked with retail, financial services, travel, health and medical, and educational websites. It’s important to be compliant, he says, but it’s more important to make the world a better place.

“No one wants to be that company or that website that’s not empathetic to all of society,” he adds, “including the disabled.”
 

MSP proudly hosts “major product design companies like Target, 3M, Medtronic, General Mills, Cargill,” says Dr. Barry Kudrowitz, McKnight Land-Grant Professor of Product Design at the University of Minnesota. However, he adds, “They’re all hiring their product designers from other states.”

Kudrowitz and the U of M are changing that, as Kudrowitz has helped spearhead the new Product Design major that the college introduced this fall and he’s excited to see how it develops with time.

Product Design is similar to engineering, he says, but with more creativity and humanistic skills. “There is a need for a different kind of designer, someone that can do the technical stuff and the artistic side of things,” he explains. Product Design will bring a new type of designer to the workforce, he says, one that has the technical skills to make a product work, but is also a dynamic and creative team player.

Kudrowitz was inspired by programs in northern Europe, having worked as a visiting researcher in the Netherlands and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The U of M recruited him after he earned his Ph.D. at MIT, where he developed a Toy Design class that he’s brought to the U of M as part of his new program. He also teaches the intro course, Creative Design Methods.

Product Design began as a minor in the graduate school before moving to the U’s undergraduate program a few years ago. As more students signed up for the classes, the U was also approached by local businesses to develop something in tune with their needs.

“We had a handful of town hall meetings where we would get several dozen industry representatives sharing what they think the major should be,” Kudrowitz explains. “They all want to hire people from this program.” While there is industry support, the U has been careful that it maintains an educational focus while cultivating tomorrow’s designers—who will hopefully stay in the Minnesota workforce.

Local companies are involved in the classroom, leading development ideas and sponsoring design concepts, but for Dr. Kudrowitz it’s about using that experience to show how design works at a fundamental level, whether that’s starting with a toy or making a specialized manufacturing product. It’s about building a portfolio and experience for students in a hands-on environment that mixes engineering, anthropology, business and industrial design.

In his U of M Toy Design class, the emphasis is on process while using a product that everyone understands. “We could call the class Product Design,” he says. “We just happen to be making toys because it’s naturally fun to design something for play.” But whether designing a toy or a medical device, he says, his classes teach the same business lessons.

In the 2016-2017 school year, the Product Design program is only open to transfer students who have changed majors, about 30 in total. Kudrowitz expects about 40 new students will be accepted when the program opens to incoming freshmen next year.
 

A year ago, the Minneapolis Idea eXchange (MiX) launched its festival of ideas in downtown Minneapolis during a lively event in which innovators from throughout MSP inspired participants to think in fresh new ways about the initiatives proposed in the Minneapolis Downtown Council’s 2025 Plan. On Wednesday, October 12, MiX resumes with its 2016 program, “The Power of Ideas.” Networking begins at 4:30 p.m., with the program scheduled from 5-6 p.m. The event takes place at Brave New Workshop.
 
John Sweeney, owner of Brave New Workshop, is kicking off the event along with Elena Imaretska. The two co-wrote the recently published book The Innovative Mindset. “MiX is a program that recognizes MSP as a world-class wellspring of innovation and a place of ideas,” Sweeney says. “The premise of our book is that you choose your mindset during your every waking hour. We work on helping people take a very practical approach to cultivating and maintaining an innovative mindset, in order to use skills like brainstorming and methodologies like design thinking to solve challenges.”
 
Following Sweeney and Imaretska’s group exercise in finding an innovative mindset, Tom Fisher, director of the University of Minnesota’s Metropolitan Design Center and author of Designing Our Way to a Better World, will guide an introduction to design thinking and launch the workshop portion of the event. Other panelists scheduled to participate in the event include Sondra Samuels of Northside Achievement Zone and Peter Frosch of Greater MSP. 
 
Minneapolis is “working on a commitment to end homelessness by 2025, figuring out how bicyclists and pedestrians and cars can navigate our roads together, how we can have a more equitable distribution of graduation rates in high schools, how to make the arts more accessible for everyone—the list goes on and on,” Sweeney says. MiX was created, in part, to address and provide working solutions for such problems.
 
“I’m passionate about gathering together a group of people with many different points of view to generate opportunities for harvesting the creativity and innovation that already exist here,” adds Imaretska. “That’s the beauty of innovation: Who knows what spark of an idea may trigger something bigger.”
 
The event will include a service component: A new take on the idea of “happy hour,” during which participants will make sandwiches that will be distributed to the homeless. “By matching a sense of service with a culture of innovation, we hope powerful things will be happening," says Imaretska.
 
Sweeney adds that he hopes this year’s MiX will result in outcomes that reflect “the hopefulness of starting. When you have 200 people in a room with open minds and a beer in their hands and a smile on their faces, then it’s a start. I'm excited to be a part of something that could someday be referred to as ‘the start.’”
 
MiX is free and open to the public. Register for MiX 2016: “The Power of Ideas” here.
 

ChangeX, the Dublin-based, technology-driven social enterprise startup, has yet to celebrate its second birthday, but it’s already looking to conquer its first overseas market: Minnesota. To mark its international launch, ChangeX held a (local) star-studded launch gala September 12 at the Pillsbury A-Mill Artist Lofts in St. Anthony Main. The event showcased remarks from CEO Paul O’Hara, St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, Ramsey County Commissioner Toni Carter, and Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Jerry Greenfield (ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s was also on hand).
 
ChangeX is a standardized platform, or more accurately a collection of local communities, operating on the same digital architecture that puts proven social enterprise concepts in front of local stakeholders, who can choose to adopt or not adopt them at their discretion. Think of it as a bottom-up approach to philanthropy and community building — or, less charitably, Craigslist for social entrepreneurs. O’Hara wants to put 100 social change concepts to work in Minnesota within a year — an ambitious, “but hopefully possible,” goal.
 
“It’s crazy to think that barely a year ago, we were just getting started, and now we’re getting ready to launch in another country,” O’Hara said before introducing 10 potential change concepts. Among them: Men’s Sheds, an established international organization dedicated to improving social connections and quality of life for isolated men around the world; Welcoming America, an American charity built to bridge gaps in understanding between immigrants and the communities they seek to join; and Coder Dojo, an Irish initiative that makes programming languages fun and accessible for children of all ages.
 
According to O’Hara, the company’s engagement rates grew by an average of 120 percent per month over the past year, albeit from a very small baseline. That kind of growth is almost unheard of, even in the tech world.
 
Still, the company’s experienced leadership, all too cognizant of the complexities of international business, remained reticent to move beyond its country of origin too soon. It took a decisive show of support by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Ben & Jerry’s charitable arm, plus a serendipitous encounter with the person who’d become their local leader—Jen Aspengren, a seasoned nonprofit leader most recently with Ashoka United States—to change the calculus.
 
“We chose Minnesota for a combination of reasons,” said O’Hara, including “a vibrant civic society, a thriving nonprofit sector and a variety of social issues” that the ChangeX team felt its platform could tackle. The linchpin, he added, was Aspengren, who has a big task ahead of her. She’ll play a key role in what O’Hara calls ChangeX’s “humble” goal: improving the lives of 1 billion people over the next 10 years. “Improving” is defined pretty broadly here, but even so, O’Hara readily admits he “has no idea how we’re going to do it.”
 
Nevertheless, local leaders are happy to have a new social enterprise kid on the block. “So many folks out there are creating these nuggets [of ideas] that can change the world,” said Mayor Coleman, adding that “the more dysfunctional our federal and state governments get,” the harder it is to achieve real change through traditional top-down processes.
 
Fittingly, ChangeX’s Minnesota experiment will sink or swim on the strength of the state’s greatest asset: its people. “This whole thing is pointless without you all,” said O’Hara, gesturing to the gathered crowd. “So please share your ideas, join other initiatives and spread the word about ChangeX.”
 
 
 

Mia is teaming up with 3M and Accenture to bankroll MSP’s most innovative—not to mention financially rewarding—art prize of the year: The 3M Art and Technology Award Competition (#ARTtech16), which is accepting entries now through September 30.
 
The competition promises up to $50,000 in prize money for the lucky winner. The pot is split between a $25,000 cash prize and up to $25,000 more for research, development and travel. According to Mia’s award explainer page, the winner earns the opportunity “to work with Mia, 3M, Best Buy, Microsoft and others to help bring [their] concept to life.”
 
3M Art and Technology Award Competition submissions are intended to slough off “stuffy” artistic conventions and explore the intersection of art and technology. “If you’re passionate about art and technology and have an idea about how to enhance the museum experience [at Mia], here’s your chance to impress the best,” according to Mia’s website. “Our panel of digital experts is looking for innovative, out-of-the box concepts that will inspire, connect, and engage museum audiences—young and old alike.”
 
According to Mia, the best submissions will have all these attributes:

• Innovative and creative: “something that’s never been done before”
• Engaging to viewers and users
• Accessible to everyone, including “historically underserved” audiences
• Multifaceted: offering “deep audience engagement via digital platforms, interfaces, tools, experiences”
• Impressive and impactful: offering a “wow factor” or “pleasant surprise”
• Feasible to implement

Additionally, entrants need to clearly communicate their ideas and demonstrate they can implement their proposals as planned. Contestants can submit as many ideas as they like through Mia’s application form.
 

Sansoro Health, a Minneapolis-based electronic health records startup, has had a pretty good month. The company announced earlier this week that it had raised approximately $1.2 million in seed capital, including a substantial sum from TreeHouse Health, a health tech incubator on Loring Park.
 
Healthy Ventures, a San Francisco-based health tech fund, led the seed round. The fund’s involvement is a clear vote of confidence not just for Sansoro Health’s innovative EHR solution, but also or the state of MSP’s medtech industry in general.
 
“The seamless clinical data exchange between EMR [EHR] platforms and digital health vendors is critically important to achieving better health outcomes,” enthused Anya Schiess, Healthy Ventures general partner, in a statement announcing the round’s closing. “Sansoro Health’s real-time integration software bridges the gap to improve patient care.”
 
And the feeling was mutual. “We are proud to have the support of investors like Healthy Ventures who share our vision for EMR integration,” added Jeremy Edes Pierotti, Sansoro Health’s CEO. “We’ve had strong revenue since inception, which enabled us to bootstrap our development. This funding will allow us to further empower innovation by providers, payers, and digital health pioneers.”
 
Sansoro Health isn’t unique in its ability to bootstrap (until now). But it’s one more data point in favor of the argument that healthcare funders, including local players like TreeHouse and Bay Area guns like Healthy Ventures, are taking a more conservative approach in a capital-raising market that many impartial observers believe is overheated. When the smart money gets conservative, companies that can demonstrate their market potential — ideally, by pointing to balance sheets with real revenue from real clients — tend to come out ahead.
 
And a more measured funding landscape is good for MSP companies in general. Though data is sparse, Minnesota companies enjoy a longstanding reputation for prudent, iterative governance — a disadvantage when funders are all about flashy “next big things,” but a pronounced benefit during pullbacks.
 
And what about Sansoro Health, specifically? The company came into its seed round with a healthy head of steam. Healthcare Informatics, a noted industry publication, selected Sansoro as one of six “up and comers” for 2016 — a prestigious honor that the company is understandably touting left and right. It also won Venture+ Forum’s 2016 startup competition at this year’s Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Annual Conference.
 

CBRE, a Los Angeles-based commercial real estate company with a global footprint and a presence in virtually every major American city, is consolidating its entire Minnesota team in one chic downtown Minneapolis location. CBRE’s move is the latest in a long string of companies relocating from the suburbs to MSP’s twin downtowns.
 
The 34,000-square-foot office, on the 19th and 20th floors of LaSalle Plaza, brings together nearly 200 employees previously housed in Bloomington’s Two MarketPointe and downtown Minneapolis’ Young Quinlan Building.
 
CBRE’s Minnesota move is part of the company’s global “Workplace 360” initiative, an ambitious plan to reposition the firm as a millennial-friendly innovation engine. According to a press release, Workplace 360 “promote(s) flexibility, mobility and productivity through technology-enabled, free-address and paperless offices.”
 
In Minneapolis, Workplace 360 means open, airy offices connected by spacious hallways and a custom-designed internal staircase. CBRE’s MSP employees don’t have assigned desks; the bulk of the space qualifies as “collaborative.” (“Employees have the flexibility to choose where they want to work for the day,” says CBRE, “whether at a desk, in a team huddle room or the social cafe area.”) The office is paperless, and designed around employees’ mobile devices, not company-owned desktop computers and printers.
 
“We understand how the office environment impacts culture, productivity, and talent recruitment and retention,” says Blake Hastings, CBRE’s managing director in Minneapolis. “The nature of work is changing in our industry and we see it every day with the clients we serve.” To paraphrase, CBRE is working to attract and retain more talented young people, and keep them engaged and on point.
 
CBRE Minneapolis seems off to a good start. Though CBRE’s corporate Workplace Strategy Team oversaw the buildout in collaboration with its Project Management Team, the company did assign key design, decorating and culture choices to local employees — for instance, they selected the “WELCOME TO MINNESOTA” wall mural centerpiece and developed the office wellness program.
 
“The whole design is inspired by the Mississippi River running through Minneapolis,” says Tiffany Bagley, CBRE Workplace Strategy director, “and fully represents CBRE’s embrace of the concept ‘think globally, act locally.’”
 

Player’s Health, a sports medicine startup based out of COCO’s Northeast Minneapolis hub, has made quite a name for itself in the short time it’s been in Minnesota. Last week, the company earned top prize at Google Demo Day, arguably the United States’ most visible startup pitch competition. Though the award itself doesn’t have a monetary component, more than 100 Silicon Valley financiers attend Demo Day each year, and the event is widely regarded as one of the world’s best places to raise startup capital.
 
Case in point: according to the Star Tribune, more than 100 Silicon Valley-based investment firms listened to this year’s 11 pitches.
 
Though Player’s Health hasn’t raised any funding off the award yet, there’s plenty of opportunity in the weeks ahead. AOL founder and former CEO Steve Case has pledged to personally give $100,000 to any finalist that raises $1 million within 100 days of Demo Day. Player’s Health has a head start: It’s currently in the midst of its first major fundraising push, slated to continue through the spring.
 
Founded by Chicago native and former pro football player Tyrre Burks, Player’s Health uses data to make youth sports safer for kids, less worrisome for parents, and less logistically challenging for coaches and school systems. The company’s signature solution is a HIPAA-compliant platform that builds and stores complete player profiles for youth sports participants.
 
These profiles contain a stunning breadth of information: not just personal health data, but also the type of field each kid plays on, the type of equipment used, where injuries occur and more. Over the long term, Burks hopes to tap an ever-growing body of injury data to produce targeted insights about where, how and why injuries occur. School systems and non-academic sports leagues can then use those insights to mitigate injury risk and ensure injured athletes recover properly.
 
“We manage not just injury, but record proper diagnosis and when patients can come back,” Burks told the Star Tribune. He saw his promising football career cut short by injury. “We need an app that collects this info to better understand the environment and how to make it safer.”
 
Player’s Health’s platform won’t be fully operational until June, when it begins tracking player injuries as they occur. But that hasn’t stopped Player’s Health from lining up a host of clients from Minnesota and surrounding states — including Minneapolis’ Homegrown Lacrosse, a youth lacrosse league.
 

On May 13, the University of St. Thomas’s Schulze School of Entrepreneurship hosted at least 50 MSP and Greater Minnesota nonprofit leaders and social entrepreneurs at DesignHack!, a one-of-a-kind event billed as a crash course in “human centered design.” The goal: to leverage the same principles behind simple but radical consumer product improvements, like OXO’s now-ubiquitous kitchen measuring cup with angled 3D fill lines.
 
DesignHack! Used Stanford University’s five-step design thinking model — which asks designers to approach problems “looking out from the inside, not outside in” — to tackle a core challenge: How do we rethink philanthropy to increase public engagement?
 
Dr. AnnMarie Thomas and Laura Dunham, who teach at the Schulze School, led attendees through design thinking’s five steps:
 

1. Empathy: Discovering users’ implicit and explicit needs — the learning phase
2. Define: Refocusing questions to drill deeper into users’ needs and determine how they can be met through design
3. Ideate: Brainstorming creative design solutions
4. Prototype: Making those solutions tangible
5. Test: Determining whether those solutions work in practice

 
The typical design project takes weeks or even months, noted Dunham. DesignHack! attendees had just a single workday, so they weren’t able to run through a proper start-to-finish simulation.
 
But they did get to wander Minneapolis’s skyway system on a busy Friday, pulling aside passersby and asking open-ended questions about their relationship with modern philanthropy. Participants worked in pairs: one lead questioner and one note-taker/observer, with roles flipping periodically.
 
Per Dunham, they followed some basic design thinking “do’s” and “don’ts”:
 

• Do listen more than you speak
• Do ask how, then follow up with why
• Do probe for specific experiences and stories, not abstractions or generalizations
• Don’t ask leading questions (“push polling”)
• Don’t monopolize the conversation
• Don’t try to fill silences
• Don’t push the respondent to wrap up or conclude
• Don’t reaffirm your own bias
• Don’t ask what respondents want

 
In other words, don’t look for empirical conclusions right away. Instead, allow respondents to create their own narratives. “Be more Oprah than Edison,” quipped Dunham.
 
“Channel your inner two-year-old,” added Thomas. “Ask ‘how this’ and ‘why that.’”
 
It’s safe to bet that DesignHack! attendees didn’t solve philanthropy’s engagement problem in the course of a single afternoon. But they definitely left Minneapolis equipped with new tools for tackling the complex issues that vex their organizations every day.
 

Knight Cities Challenge, a massive social enterprise contest supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, announced the 37 winners of its 2016 competition last week. Two innovative concepts hatched in St. Paul made the cut, taking home more than $250,000 (of the contest’s $5 million total prize) between them.
 
Front Lawn Placemaking Platform, submitted by The Musicant Group, won about $82,000 — payable over the coming year — to support its goal: “Transforming front lawns from empty expanses of grass to vibrant places full of life through the development of a toolkit that encourages residents to create community hubs on their doorsteps.”
 
I’m Going to Vote Today, submitted by the University of St. Thomas (UST), won about $170,000 — also payable over the coming year — to put an updated spin on the age-old “I Voted!” trope. Instead of distributing “I Voted!” clothing or bumper stickers at polling places, the initiative hands out “I’m Going to Vote Today” stickers to eligible voters.
 
The goal, according to UST associate professor for marketing Aaron Sackett, is “behavioral intervention.” In an article released by UST, he explained: “First, sending out this sticker should serve as a reminder for people to make a plan for how and when to vote…[s]econd, the sticker and accompanying message serve as an indicator that voting is a socially desirable action, and that by wearing the sticker they can show both themselves and others that they engage in this desirable action.”
 
By labeling themselves voters, Sackett added, people wearing the sticker positively affect the behavior of “people who generally have a positive attitude toward voting but who don’t always follow through and vote” — rendering them more likely to vote. Now that his concept is funded, Sackett plans to test it across St. Paul, which has tens of thousands of registered voters.
 
These two initiatives were among more than 500 submissions. Following a rigorous review, Knight Cities Challenge narrowed the pool down to about 160 finalists, a significant increase over previous years. Knight then subjected finalists to a further round of view before settling on the 37 finalists. According to the organization, Challenge winners hail from 19 cities around the country — most of the markets in which Knight operates.
 
According to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Knight Cities Challenge contestants must “focus on one or more of three drivers of city success: attracting and keeping talented people, expanding economic opportunity and creating a culture of civic engagement.”
 
The Florida-based Knight Foundation, which has an active presence in Minnesota but invests nationwide, is sometimes confused with the Minneapolis-based McKnight Foundation. McKnight invests heavily in sectors such as clean energy and sustainability, arts, education and community building, training most of its firepower in the MSP region and surrounding parts of the North.
 
 

MSP’s edgiest marketing agency is growing — fast. Back in 2012, when The Line first caught up with SixSpeed Agency, the irreverent “brand experience” outfit had just over 20 employees. Today, it’s topped 50, with more hires planned for this year.
 
And that’s just the human headcount. SixSpeed has three canine helpers: Samson, the office dog; Hank, the shop dog; and Frannie, the office princess. (She clearly runs the show.)
 
SixSpeed occupies an unusual niche in MSP’s busy creative landscape. The agency has an internal creative/design team staffed with graphic artists, digital gurus, copywriters, editors: fairly standard. But SixSpeed also has a “production” team responsible for putting on singular events and experiences — the “experience” in “brand experiences” — for clients like Red Bull and Polaris. The agency has a heavy hand in Red Bull’s Crashed Ice series; in 2013, SixSpeed put on an off-road extravaganza tour to promote Polaris’s new RZR vehicle line.
 
SixSpeed also has an in-house “build” team, housed in an 8,000-square-foot shop at the agency’s headquarters. The build team is responsible for turning SixSpeed’s offbeat ideas into tangible things. Its most recent creation is a “mobile speakeasy” cart dubbed Thunderbuss, or ‘Buss for short: a “custom chopped” vintage motorbike attached to a monstrous wood-paneled cart with taps, holders and all the supplies needed to make a killer cocktail.
 
According to principal Andi Dickson, it’s rare for an agency to have in-house creative design and build capabilities under the same roof. In fact, Dickson isn’t aware of any MSP agencies that fit the bill. Rather than invest in an internal build team, most agencies work with external contractors as needed. That might help control costs, but at what cost?
 
SixSpeed’s blue-chip clients hold the agency to high standards, notes Dickson. They expect projects to be completed quickly, on spec, and with a level of quality and consistency that’s difficult to find on the freelance market.
 
Aside from being good for business, keeping everything in-house is great for employee morale. SixSpeed’s design team can walk across the office and actually touch the fruits of their labor, gaining a sense of pride and ownership that’s out of reach for creatives at less hands-on agencies.
 
“Creative people like nothing more than watching their ideas come to life,” says Dickson. “SixSpeed’s creative and build sides are really like two halves of the same brain.”
 

Phantom Records AMG-TCLA, an ascendant Minneapolis-based record label, hopes to raise MSP’s already significant profile as a creative hub for the auditory arts. Phantom is the brainchild of founder Alex Guerrero (stage name: Dweedo). He pulls quintuple duty as a producer, songwriter, talent scout, manager and promoter.
 
“Our inspiration for starting up a record label is to give Minnesota the attention it deserves within the music industry,” says Guerrero. “We want to continue the work of former producers like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who put MSP on the map. …[B]ut we [also] want the world to see that...amazing sounds are being produced outside New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.”
 
Guerrero has help from four other MSP music notables. Ariel Padilla (stage name: A.P.) serves as associate producer. Julian Scott (JuChefe) is the in-house arranger and DJ. Rob Skalsky (Robby Cur$ed) is co-talent scout, assistant editor, photographer/videographer and musical artist. Lou Oberg (J3b Adea) is lead graphic designer and co-photographer/videographer. And Cameron McCrimmon (Malovinci) is a promising artist.
 
Record labels come and go. Phantom plans to stick around by adding a human touch to an industry that’s increasingly focused on flashy, transient trends — good for the bottom line, perhaps, but not for music lovers or artists.
 
“Our goal is simple: we want to make music that you can feel and relate to on another level,” explains Guerrero. “We want to be more than just a record label. We want to be a part of our listeners’ experience.”

“Phantom Records is all about putting emotion back into music,” he adds.

According to Guerrero, Phantom is actively recruiting “hardworking, dedicated artists” willing to work with a startup label. He’s also hunting for “influential” artists capable of lending visibility to a nascent label in a crowded marketplace.

“We plan on keeping up with the latest trends, while having veteran artists over time help groom younger artists coming into the industry,” says Guerrero. “We want our artists, our company and our values to feel like they're part of a really special movement that brings people together from all walks of life.” Phantom Records plans to keep its operational base in MSP for the foreseeable future.