Moving High-Tech Ideas to the Marketplace
When Murfreesboro-based Mind2Marketplace hosted hundreds of participants at the Tennessee Valley Corridor Fall Partnership Event in November 2009, the summit boosted M2M’s status as a player in technology economic development. In fact, M2M’s alliance with the Tennessee Valley Corridor, a five-state technology collaboration based in Oak Ridge, was a perfect example of M2M fulfilling its mission – to help make the brightest ideas in Middle Tennessee a reality.
“We saw this as a win-win for us as an organization and an opportunity to showcase Middle Tennessee and the assets that we have here,” says Sandy Ponder, M2M executive director.
Founded in 2006 by the Rutherford County Chamber of Commerce, Middle Tennessee State University and the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development, M2M is the result of a challenge issued to Middle Tennessee leaders by U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon. As chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology, Gordon urged the region “to help, nurture, encourage and support technology-based ideas and innovation and move them to the marketplace,” Ponder explains.
Thus, M2M was born, encompassing a 40-county region. Chaired by Andrea J. Loughry, a retired Murfreesboro business executive, M2M began with quarterly meetings and an outreach strategy that has built an impressive list of partners from economic development, education, private-sector and high-tech arenas. M2M is funded primarily by MTSU and the University of Tennessee Institute for Public Service, but it's working toward independent, nonprofit status. The organization hired Ponder, its first full-time professional, in August 2008. Ponder brought to the job 10 years of economic-development experience, including a stint with an organization whose charge is similar to M2M’s.
M2M has identified several economic sectors in which Middle Tennessee boasts substantial resources, such as biotechnology and life sciences, and aerospace and aviation. Committees exist for those sectors as well as education and entrepreneurship. Ponder says any initiative with a technology bent qualifies as one of interest to M2M. She describes M2M as a “facilitator” or “broker” to encourage commercialization of Middle Tennessee’s brainpower.
“To me, what really distinguishes this organization is the ability to connect the partners that we have, who are all doing phenomenal work. How do we leverage that in a greater way?” she says. “We’re not trying to be everything to everyone. We’re trying to leverage our rich assets and have that dialogue across those sectors, which I think betters the entire region.”
M2M is a partner in MTSU’s Master Teaching Fellows Program, a five-year program funded by the National Science Foundation to put 14 exceptional math and science teachers into high-needs Middle Tennessee high schools. Also on the M2M agenda for 2010 are entrepreneurial roundtables and mentoring in rural areas.
