Last night’s Mass Innovation Night was an interesting experiment, and quite successful. Chris Raia and I used the event as an opportunity to test out a new project, the Urban Animal Design Collaborative, and we got a lot of great feedback.

 

 

Chris and I have long been considering a joint venture that would allow us to make our collaborative efforts a bit more formal, while maintaining independent business structures as needed. Additionally, we are interested in supporting other independents whose skills are frequently required during the product development process, such as engineers, graphic designers, and photographers.

 

 

At MassInno we presented both our mutual and individual work under the Urban Animal mantle to the trade-show-esque audience, and the responses were very interesting. A lot of people asked really excellent questions or suggested alternative marketing approaches. One individual had even attempted the same model in the IT arena (with limited success). If any of you, Dear Readers, have thoughts on the subject, I would of course be intrigued to hear them.

 

The event itself was well organized and attended, and the presenters more varied than the previous event, which made it even more enjoyable. I had a hard time peeling away from our table in order to fully check out the others, but ThinkMagic‘s USB RFID reader was very cool, as was Canson’s Papershow “digital paper” system. Also, there were Popsicles. And perhaps that is the definition of success.