2012 - yCITIES

12Dec 2012 by Mark K No Comments

Entrepreneurship & Sustainability in the Christmas Tree Industry

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Eliminate Waste - that is one of the key objectives associated with current sustainability thinking and teaching. Some organizations, like Terracycle, strive so far as to eliminate the idea of waste. Yet, whether in practice or in principle, the goal is to examine existing waste streams (outputs) and find ways to make them inputs into some other useful process. It may sound easy, but it’s not, which is why we do not yet have ways to reuse and recycle everything we throw away today. This week’s post was inspired by the reality TV show Shark Tank (Episode 409). [As a general rule, I dislike reality TV. But, I make an exception for Shark Tank simply because I love to hear the creative business ideas of regular Americans. I find many…

07Dec 2012 by Vicky Wu Davis No Comments

Musings of my Kickstarter Experience

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There are probably a million things I’d do differently if I was to do a Kickstarter campaign again. I will focus on 5 over the next week or so, and then I will conclude with how this experience has been very beneficial. Musing #1: Pre-marketing is very important. With the right people. A friend of mine mentioned that he had hired a PR person well-before he was launching his Kickstarter campaign to create buzz. I totally understood the reasoning behind it, but he had a company that he wanted to launch a new product using Kickstarter to raise the funds. I, on the other hand, was teaming up with 2 other partners in crime to do a project....so there was no budget. Hiring a PR person was not an option,…

30Nov 2012 by Mark K No Comments

Greater Boston Meets TED

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No, I don’t mean Mark Wahlberg’s talking teddy bear. (Though, we could make this a topic for a future blog post;-) This is a long awaited post for me. Two weeks ago, on November 17th & 18th, I attended a series of locally organized TED Talks. TEDxBeaconStreet featured more than 90 talks by innovators, teachers, scientists, businesspeople, thought-leaders, and others tied to Greater Boston. [I was holding off the blog entry until I could share this highlight reel with you.] At the two-day conference, I got a chance to listen to intriguing and inspiring presentations on topics ranging from music & food to science & technology, including one talk about flexible computer chips you can wear on your skin!! Of course, a favorite talk of mine was by given by…

29Nov 2012 by Vicky Wu Davis No Comments

The Teacher Becomes the Student

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You know how, in certain subjects, it’s really cool to have a teacher who’s also a practitioner? Well, even though I started Youth CITIES 4 years ago after having run the same company I founded over a decade ago, I am back in the trenches. Practicing what I often talk about in the Youth CITIES classes, I’ve combined my experience/background in the videogame industry with my personal interest in raising my young kids to be bilingual. Being a practitioner puts me back in the hot seat, just like all of you who’ve been through the Youth CITIES March-to-May bootcamp. I may have found a valid pain point and what my value proposition is, but I’ve been re-working and refining my elevator pitch over and over again. (It is always much…

12Nov 2012 by Mark K No Comments

Engagement with Enthusiasm

Mini-Hack

For the November Mini-Hack held last week, Youth CITIES was visited by the Events & Logistics Coordinator of the Cambridge Science Festival, Sung Kim. The Cambridge Science Festival (CSF) is a multifaceted event that offers STEM-related lectures, exhibitions, concerts, workshops, and more over a ten-day period at a variety of locations. CSF seeks to make science accessible, interactive, and fun by highlighting the impact of STEM in all our lives. Sung Kim posed the following problem to the students, teachers, and entrepreneurs present: How do we best engage the teenage (12-18) audience in STEM? Throughout the course of our brainstorming, one thing became quite evident – the teenagers who came to CIC to participate in the Mini-Hack needed no extra push or prodding from adults to be fully engaged in…

31Oct 2012 by Vicky Wu Davis No Comments

Introducing a New Blog Contributor

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Youth CITIES has drawn some very positive attention lately. Last month, Youth CITIES was selected to participate in an open source philanthropy event sponsored by TUGG (Technology Underwriting the Greater Good). We represented ourselves very well and had the opportunity to introduced the concept of our program to over 600 young professionals, most of whom work in technology-related fields in Greater Boston. We ended up receiving some grant funding from TUGG as a result of the attendees votes! After the event, we received tons of positive feedback. Many people have expressed interest in learning more about Youth CITIES, and some have already volunteered to donate their time and expertise to helping our organization grow. One of our new fans is Mark Kampert, a student of sustainability, project manager, and Returned…

01Aug 2012 by Vicky Wu Davis No Comments

Backwards approach to entrepreneurship

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In a recent campaign for youth entrepreneurship at the State House, I spoke briefly about what makes someone an entrepreneur. Lately, I’ve also been thinking a lot about how someone may discover that they are an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurial tendencies arise due to a number of factors. These include personality traits, economic climate, and the environment/culture around them. I was raised in a fiscally-conservative family, where building a nest egg was a priority. When I had my first internship at Lockheed as a Graphics Illustrator at age 16, my mom had me put most of it in an IRA account. Whatever left over amount (beyond the maximum I could put in an IRA), well, my mom said I could do whatever I wanted with the money. I was 16....it was an…

24Jul 2012 by Vicky Wu Davis No Comments

Join us at the Young Entrepreneurs Campaign

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As I mentioned in my previous post, Youth CITIES is actively supporting Ingrid Li’s campaign for youth entrepreneurship. Ingrid is an amazing Winchester High School student, and Founder of the Entrepreneurial Youth Society (EYS). EYS is dedicated to promoting the spirit of entrepreneurship among youth across America. If you are interested in supporting the campaign, feel free to drop by the State House (Nurse’s Hall) on July 25th at 10:30am. There will be a rotating list of speakers, followed by a networking reception. The State House speaker agenda includes the following: Representative Jason Lewis, District Winchester Representative Senator Katherine Clark, Vice-Chair of Committee on Small Business Representative Alice Peisch, Chair of Committee on Education Tim Rowe, CEO and Founder of Cambridge Innovation Center Vicky Wu Davis, Founder and Executive Director…

23Jul 2012 by Vicky Wu Davis No Comments

Supporting Ingrid Li

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Youth CITIES is happy to support Ingrid Li on her youth entrepreneurship campaign at the State House on July 25th. Ingrid is a very passionate student at Winchester High School, and we are so excited to join her in bringing awareness to teens about the power of entrepreneurship.

23Jul 2012 by Vicky Wu Davis No Comments

Welcome to our new website!

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I am very excited to be launching our brand new website! It is almost done, but some of it is still under construction. I’m very excited to have a “virtual incubator” available for any past or present Youth CITIES student, where mentors and peers can help make the idea into a reality...that will be available some time in early August....more info on it soon. The other program that I’m in the process of creating is a “Tech Tinkering Track”. Entrepreneurs get inspired in different ways, and by different activities. My goal is to have hands-on technology creation sessions where the goal is just to figure out how to build a product (whether it’s a robot, a videogame, a new design for a soda can top, etc) that somehow benefits a…