A group led by the University of Missouri-Kansas City Innovation Center unveiled its plans today for Digital Sandbox KC, a proof-of-concept and mentoring center made possible by a $1 million federal grant last year.
During a press event at Union Station, the Digital Sandbox’s future home, officials introduced the center’s director and board of advisors and provided details of its application process, eligibility guidelines and future operations.
“Today, our civic and business leadership is coming together in a way that is truly unprecedented,” UMKC chancellor Leo Morton said at the event. “Kansas City was built by entrepreneurs. They started out as acorns, full of potential, and eventually grew into mighty oaks. And as they grew, this community grew with them. Now, they are dedicating themselves to nurturing a new generation of seedlings.”
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Veteran technology entrepreneur Jeff Shackelford (right), who comes to the organization from Time Warner, has been named the center’s director. Representatives from Sprint, Hallmark, Cerner and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation are among more than a dozen private companies, universities, entrepreneurial support organizations and government agencies on the center’s 15-member board of advisors (below).
The consortium’s leaders anticipate the Digital Sandbox will generate a minimum of 10 new high-growth companies with either follow-on funding or at least $1 million in revenue each within two years of the launch.
“But that doesn’t mean we’re just going to help 10 companies,” UMKC Innovation Center director Maria Meyers said Thursday in anticipation of today’s announcement. “We’re going to look at a lot of concepts and help move as many forward as we can.”
The center offers participants seed funding – Meyers said it will vary, but her “guesstimate” is an average of about $30,000 per participant – and visibility and access to corporate resources. Each of the center’s partners, which include digital marketing agency VML and mobile app development startup RareWire, is providing in-kind services.
With a focus on four areas – data center and cloud operations; big data and data analytics; mobile applications; and data security – the center expects to assist participants for no more than a year.
“We are going to be looking for ideas that can move along fairly quickly and that we’re going to hopefully see the proof of concept come to fruition within a 6-12 month period,” Myers said. Those ideas will be accepted from three sources: universities, corporations – technology Meyers described as “sitting on the shelf” – and entrepreneurs.
People from outside of the Kansas City region are encouraged to apply, but, according to the press release, any operations associated with technology development and establishment of resulting business or business expansion must be located within the Kansas City metropolitan area.
“We’d love to see a lot of ideas come out of the Kansas City region,” Meyers said.
Applications to join Digital Sandbox open today and close March 1. The center isn’t set on a certain number of participants for its first class, it “just depends on what comes in,” Meyers said, noting there will be two more application periods over the next 18 months.
Digital Sandbox’s news today follows in the wake last week’s emergence of startup accelerator SparkLabKC. But don’t call Digital Sandbox an accelerator. In fact, Meyers said startups could be a part of both. In addition to SparkLabKC, which is represented on the center’s advisory board, Kansas City area accelerators include Think Big Partners and BetaBlox.
To learn about Digital Sandbox KC’s funding, which total $1.5 million, see our post: “UMKC-led group lands $1 million grant to foster growth of tech startups“.
Look to EyeVerify as an example
To understand the Digital Sandbox’s place in a startup’s life, one could look at mobile authentication software startup EyeVerify, which is based on a biometric technology developed at UMKC.
“One of the things that needed to happen in that particular project – to move that particular technology from the university into the marketplace – was proof-of-concept (because) the orginal technology was being developed on a large camera,” Meyers said. “The question is, ‘Could you run the technology and get it to work on a cellphone?’ “
Once that was proved, said Meyers, the business could be “created, funded and moved forward.”
Advisory board members
Along with naming its director and detailing its application process and operations the center unveiled its 15-member advisory board.
Representing industry:
- Kevin McGinnis, VP Product Platforms, Sprint Nextel
- Mike Jackson, Senior VP and CTO, UMB
- Mark McClendon, Partner & Managing Director, Technology, VML
- Paul Barker, VP and General Manager, Hallmark Digital
- Bill Graff, Senior VP, Cerner Technology Services, Cerner
- Clay Patterson, Managing Director, Cerner Capital
Representing entrepreneurs:
- Kirk Hasenzahl, Co-Founder and CEO, RareWire
- Kevin Fryer, Managing Director, SparkLabKC
Representing economic development organizations:
- Pete Fullerton, President and CEO, Economic Development Corp. of KC
- Jason Hall, Deputy Director, Missouri Department of Economic Development
Representing universities:
- Kevin Truman, Dean, UMKC School of Computing & Engineering
- Julie K. Goonewardene, Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, University of Kansas
Representing the philanthropic community:
- Cameron Cushman, Manager in Entrepreneurship, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
Representing the civic community:
- Mike Burke, Vice-President/Director, King Hershey, PC
- Jerry Baber, VP and CFO, Union Station Kansas City, Inc.
Credits: Screenshot from digitalsandboxkc.com. Jeff Shackelford and Maria Meyers photos courtesy of UMKC.
