Difference between revisions of "Category:Entrepreneurship"

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

See also Activism and Entrepreneurship and Third World Development and maybe even Environmental Justice,Globalization , Colonialism,Consumption, and Sustainability as well as Design Challenges. For the more intellectually adventurous, see also Systems Thinking.

Mick Ebeling shares how he and a team of collaborators built an open-source invention that gave the artist -- and gives others in his circumstance -- the means to make art again. The nerve disease ALS left graffiti artist TEMPT paralyzed from head to toe, forced to communicate blink by blink. Ebeling founded the Not Impossible Lab, a nonprofit that lets you help develop creative solutions to real-world problems TEDtalk

UCSC Computer science major Radhika Mitra founded a tax-deductible charitable organization called Renaissance Now to help artisans in developing countries.

There will be an informational Entrepreneur Showcase Roll-Out Event on March 5th from 12:30 to 3:30pm in the courtyard between Engineering 1 and 2. This will be a chance for those who are interested to learn more about the event, and how to participate as well as meet with facilitators for any questions. cagsanch AT ucsc.edu.

Background

Social entrepreneurship is a new concept, but it weaves together strands that have been around for a long time. It's about forging social relationships and organizing people, but also attempts to work with the market and leverages the power of the Internet. See brilliant video explaining one aspect of this, Web 2.0 issues such as tagging.

Wikipedia overview

Skoll Foundation definition and discussion. Martin and Oberg have an excellent extended definition/discussion of the term.

The Skoll Foundation is dedicated to fostering social entrepreneurs. video overview is a good intro. Good resources

New! UCSC Center for Entrepreneurship is a comprehensive year-long program that could result in funding and company/ngo start-up funding.

News on social entrepreneurs from Huffington Post.

PBS Newshour has extensive coverage of SE's. A recent example from Brazil 10/11.

Bioneers has a new SE Empowerment program (audio of talks) includes Van Jones: Focus On A Social Problem Nobody Else Is Solving and Come Up With An Innovative Solution (30 minutes).

Stanford Innovation Review has info on social entrepreneurs (a journal, but the website has audio and video as well). Design Thinking

TEDxYSE a self-organized TED conference for Youth Social Entrepreneurship.

Social Entrepreneur Corps has summer internships in Central America video

Unreasonable Institute offers a summer boot camp. Application due in December video.

Plastic Pollution Coalition is offering a prize for disruptive solutions to the global plastic pollution crisis. First place prize is a $50,000 investment! Applications accepted until March 18, 2013. The contest will be juried by leaders in industry and science including Eben Bayer (Ecovative), Mike Biddle (MBA Polymers), Julie Corbett (Ecologic), Adam Lowry (Method), Dr. Ramani Narayan, Mike Velings (A-Spark Good Ventures) and Adam Werbach (Yerdle). The presentation of awards and the final public event will take place at the Think Beyond Plastic annual conference on June 13-14, 2013 in Berkeley, CA, in front of an audience of entrepreneurs, investors, journalists and thought leaders.

How To

How to write a good plan/pitch for venture capital to start up from Guy Kawasaki at garage.com.

Start-up phases for entrepreneurs.

World Change 2.0: Creating a blueprint for social transformation by Scott Sherman Transformative Action Institute. Highly recommended.

Google for Entrepreneurs

Examples

Two UCB students give up finance and become social entrepreneurs, using coffee waste to grow organic mushrooms (video). ****

‘Shrimp’ Made From Algae: The Latest in Fake Meat: New Wave Foods, a San Francisco-based sustainable seafood startup, is developing a lab-grown “shrimp” made from algae that could be as nutritious as the real deal. See Fishing. 12/15.

The Real Junk Food Project, created a “Pay As You Feel” (PAYF) cafe, which asks customers to pay what they see fit for perfectly good food that, due to strict food labeling laws, would have otherwise been thrown out. 3/15

Two Young Entrepreneurs Offer Way to Grow Food in Dead of Winter The converted shipping containers are “outfitted with vertical hydroponics, high-efficiency LED lights and an automated climate control system. 2/15.

Hasti Afsarifard, put a 3D printer in spaceWhen the SpaceX Dragon containing a 3-D printer blasted toward the International Space Station last week, it was propelled by more than rocket fuel. It was boosted by the vision of Hasti Afsarifard, a UC Santa Cruz student. That dream sent her to Cape Canaveral, Florida, and it didn't end there. 10/14.

This little green laser could save bicyclists’ lives 2/14.

Elon Musk(TEDtalk) has made huge contributions as a designer and entrepreneur because he imagined what was inevitable and caught the wave to that early: Tesla electric cars, private sector spaceflight and solar energy. extensive bio interview 1/13 The Future of Energy and Transport Oxford 2012. He promises to share the technology.See also Electric cars. SpaceX will carry people.

The $20 prosthetic knee that could change lives in India 2/15.

California Startup Turns Old Wind Turbines Into Gold 3/14. See Wind.

Carbon for Water video documentary on social entrepreneur project that will use cap and trade funding tobring clean water to 900K ppl in Kenya. ***

UCSC Computer science major Radhika Mitra founded a charitable organization called Renaissance Now to help artisans in developing countries.

Echale a tu Casa is an elegantly integrated model that combines community empowerment, local technical capacity building, a novel, affordable financing system, and cutting-edge but culturally appropriate "green" building techniques to improve housing conditions for otherwise underserved populations in Mexico.

Invisible bike helmet by two women update 11.13.

2012 Winners of TheTech Museum innovation awards.

Anita Roddick, social entrepreneur, founder of The Body Shop, one of the first and most successful socially conscious businesses.

36 Women Social Entrepreneurs includes One Million Lights replaces kerosene with electric lights, as well as upcycled fair trade fashion. Beth Doane: Activist, Fashion Designer.

Slideshow of fifteen innovators 9/11

Another early and inspirational example is the founder of the Grameen microloan bank, Muhammad Yunus. You can find other examples on Eco-Heroes page. TEDtalks also feature quite a number of such folk as well, including the hundred dollar laptop, Jacqueline Novogratz You can search TEDtalks search here.

Founder Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia makes some of the best, and most expensive outdoor gear in the world, but the company’s mission is bigger than simply maximizing profit. The mission is: “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” company profile. new music project. video. (UC talk video). A great company to work for; one in 900 gets hired. Q&A. His autobiography ***

Barefoot College in India trains poor women to build, install and maintain solar energy, empowering them and their villages. PBS News Hour. See also TEDtalk

Brent Constantz developed technology to make "green" cement that could help slow global warming and ocean acidification based on a revolutionary product for healing broken bones inspired by the research on coral reefs he had conducted as a UCSC graduate student.

Popularly known as the "Clothing Man", social entrepreneur Anshu Gupta created a mass movement for recycling and reusing tons of waste material by establishing a culture of sustained donations from urban, wealthy India and its impoverished rural areas. His organization, GOONJ, has a mechanism for second-hand clothes and goods to pass from the wealthy to the poor, tackling a very basic and often neglected human need while also reducing waste. Ashoka video intro and longer video.

Bike helmet vending machine supports bikesharing.

Adam Braun, Founder and Executive Director, Pencils of Promise has built 50 schools.

FastCompany list 2008.

E-waste recycling in Chile (video) article. Canadian program to divert e-waste.

Will Wright, creator of SimCity (new version 3/12) created the mind-blowing Spore, a game for investigating evolution & complexity TEDtalk video. **** Hour long demo talk (video). 2011 talk sponsored by UCSC game design program. interesting chapter on him in Smartbomb.

Urban Gardening. Jesse DuBois - The Urban Farming Revolution TEDx. An English major in LA, the CoFounder and currently serves as the Chief Eclectic Officer for two start-ups: Farmscape, an urban farming maintenance company, and Agrisaurus, a web-based polyculture gardening assistant. (video).

Stephen Ritz is a South Bronx teacher/administrator. With the help of extended student and community family they have grown over 25,000 pounds of vegetables in the Bronx while generating extraordinary academic performance. His Bronx classroom features the first indoor edible wall in NYC DOE which routinely generates enough produce to feed 450 students healthy meals and trains the youngest nationally certified workforce in America. Stephen has consistently moved attendance from 40% to 93% daily, helped fund/create 2,200 youth jobs, captured the US EPA Award for transforming mindsets and landscapes in NYC,... His speech at Columbia University, "From Crack to Cucumbers," along with the release of a You-Tube Video (Urban Farming NYC) resulted in a national following including an invite to the White House Garden. For more information, visit www.greenbronxmachine.com. TEDtalk.

Additional Organizations

The Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) is pleased to announce the Winner of the 2016 Fuller Challenge: the Rainforest Solutions Project (RSP), a collaborative effort between three environmental organizations, which played a critical role in developing one of the most extraordinary approaches to conservation, social justice, and indigenous rights in recent memory, resulting in a historically unprecedented multigenerational agreement. See Forests.

Wiser Earth map of socially conscious organizations, many with an social entrepreneur approach.

http://www.kiva.org/. Touching video on how it was founded by Jessica Jackley also video on micro-finance 2008. Audio interview with the other co-founder Premal Shah (2010).

http://www.ashoka.org/ founder is Bill Drayton (video bio), who founded Ashoka with the help of a MacArthur "Genius" grant (animated overview). Their YouTube Channel.

http://www.worldchanging.com/

Acumen Fund founded by Jacqueline Novogratz (four TEDtalks).

Echoing Green searchable resources.

Compass Partners supports college social entrepreneurs.

Unreasonable Group

Soc entre in action at EARTH U interview with founder.

TheTech Museum of Innovation in San Jose has a annual award.

More organizations

Ecopreneurist website has The Global Transition to a New Economy world map of innovative projects which challenge business as usual and make a contribution to the systemic change to the world economy which is urgently required.

Video

PBS Newshour has extensive coverage of SE's, and also of environmental issues.

Commonwealth Club (Bay Area) series on SE. Commonwealth Club series.

Green Streets: Turning Trash into Cash in an American Inner City, is a documentary work in progress from local company Citizen Film. Green Streets follows 27-year-old entrepreneur Tyrone Mullins and his friends as they turn trash into cash in the distressed San Francisco housing projects where they live. Through trial and error, they learn to haul 150,000 gallons of waste per month, creating desperately needed jobs and establishing recycling where all previous efforts had failed.

Matthew Flannery and John Wood: Doing Well by Doing Good. Matt began developing Kiva microlending after meeting Grameen Bank founfer in late 2004 as a side-project while working as a computer programmer at TiVo. Former Microsoft executive John Wood founded Room to Read, which publishes and supplies books, builds libraries and schools, and provides scholarships for girls to developing countries. It's a classic bottom-up strategy based on Woods' belief that world change starts with educated children. He told his story in a bestselling memoir, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World.

Stanford Ripples to Waves: The Stanford Program on Social Entrepreneurship presents Kavita Ramdas, Executive Director of Ripples to Waves and former CEO of the Global Fund for Women, in conversation with Taida Horozovic, Steve Williams and Ramzi Jaber, 3 Social Entrepreneurs in Residence at Stanford (SEERS).The SEERS will share their experience of how they initiated programs in Bosnia, San Francisco, and Palestine. GoogleTalk. 5.12.

PARC Forum series (these tend to be technology and business oriented).

Global 3000, a German program shown on PBS, has extensive coverage of green issues, especially with respect to Third World entrepreneurs. Examples: Coltan mining in Congo 7/10

Envisiongood.com has lots of interviews with a variety of ppl/approaches, but lots of social entrepreneurs, including the Unreasonable Institute that mentors them.IDEO, the hottest design firm around, has a Social Impact design group that has created a free downloadable Human Centered Design Toolkit, a free innovation guide for NGOs and Social Enterprises. You can search their projects. Method cards/app. Examples: clean water and hearing aid (video).

PBS Now site.

Excellent series by PBS News Hour, especially inspiring is Barefoot University

Tactics of Hope video offers a brief overview. Website with resources

Jon Fisher on business aspects of entrepreneurship (Commonwealth Club 8/09)

Muhammad Yunus: Building Social Business Ventures (Amazon preview) is third book by Professor Yunus, following Banker to the Poor and video preview (Creating a World Without Poverty, and is dedicated solely towards the concept of social business, its implementation, and its maintenance.(preview). Founder of Grameen Bank, which makes micro-loans all over the world, empowering people in many ways, not least of which to give them the option on not exhausting their local habitats in order to survive in the short term. Yunus was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize See related videos on right. He has a new book, and a new initiative to bring microlending to the US in order to wipe out predatory payday loans. sort video and 2005 MIT lecture video 2009 talk at Google (video).

Steve Jobs biographer (is he a social entrepreneur?)

TEDtalks

TEDX Santa Cruz examples list 2014

Daniel Schnitzer co-founded EarthSpark International in 2008. Honored by the Clinton Global Initiative in 2010, EarthSpark International works in Haiti to develop markets and aid local entrepreneurs in creating a supply chain for safe, clean and renewable energy. It also played a vital role in relief efforts after the 2010 earthquake. (video)

Robin Chase founded Zipcar, the world’s biggest car-sharing business. That was one of her smaller ideas. Here she travels much farther, contemplating road-pricing schemes that will shake up our driving habits and a mesh network vast as the Interstate. TEDtalk video.

Women entrepreneurs, example not exception TEDtalk video.

Jonathan Abrams speaks about his experience as an entrepreneur at TEDxSF.

Making Money From Doing Good Noam Kostucki is a social entrepreneur who co-founded Seeducation & SeedPro through which he has coached and trained thousands of people from numerous organisations. He is passionate about education and believes everyone can make a positive contribution to the world while making money at the same time.

Simon Berry is the founder of Cola Life, which is a charity that aims to use Coca Cola's distribution channels to provide remote communities in third world countries with essential medication and water cleaning tablets. He came up with this idea in 1988 while working on the British Aid Program.

Eli Stefanski - Making Systems Thinking Sexy Stefanski, formerly with Ashoka, is an impatient social innovation junkie with over a decade of experience in building and leading social ventures, her Global Giving is crowdsourcing (especially for women, who get only 5% of traditional VC funding).

Other Sources

The New Heroes (ucsc owns: DVD2816). Sample: Albina Ruiz - Garbage Companies Peru.

Example: Nick Moon & Martin Fisher's Project: ApproTEC (Appropriate Technology for Enterprise Creation). Location: Nairobi, Kenya, offices in Tanzania, Mali and San Francisco, Calif. Nick Moon and Martin Fisher founded ApproTEC out of their belief that poor people don't need handouts, they need concrete opportunities to use their skills and initiative. ApproTEC provides these opportunities by specially designing and manufacturing tools that help people work more productively, allowing them to break the cycle of poverty.

Larry Brilliant on social entrepreneurs.

The Burning Season. "Dorjee Sun, a young entrepreneur, believes there's money to be made from saving rainforests in Indonesia and making a real impact on climate change. Armed with a laptop and a backpack, he sets out across the globe to find investors in his scheme. Meanwhile another burning season gets underway. A small-scale farmer wrestles with the dilemma of clearing his land. In Borneo, a wildlife carer battles overcrowding and despair as more orangutans are rescued from the fires.."

Commonwealth Club series: Social Entrepreneurship in America Sally Osberg: Empowering Social Entrepreneurs.

Top 10 pitfalls: What things typically trip up an entrepreneur in starting and running a company? Is it getting the right business partner? Is it having the killer technology? How does one recover from major setbacks? A panel of seasoned entrepreneurs, angels, venture capitalists, and board members discuss the common pitfalls most new entrepreneurs encounter when building their businesses. Guy Kawasaki's take at the UCB Haas School of Business. Kawasaki, former chief evangelist of Apple and co-founder of Garage Technology Ventures,

Mark Zuckerberg at Stanford Startup School 2011

Audio

Bioneers has a new SE Empowerment program (audio of talks) includes Van Jones: Focus On A Social Problem Nobody Else Is Solving and Come Up With An Innovative Solution (30 minutes).

Kiva.org, microleander, audio interview with the co-founder Premal Shah (2010).

Daniel Smith, Project Coordinator for AguaClara, talks about about strategies, innovations, and their recent recognition as the Tech Awards 2011 laureate of the Intel Environment Award. They leverage gravity rather than costly and unreliable electricity to provide for the water treatment needs in small villages.

How are the constructs of social innovation and social entrepreneurship connected? Kriss Deiglmeier Executive Director, Center for Social Innovation, Stanford University (blog).

Bill Drayton, Founder and Chairman, Ashoka. With the creation in 1981 of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, Drayton put forward the notion that the individual person driving the change is worth supporting, rather than the organization itself. He contends that the most powerful force is a big idea in the right hands: those of an entrepreneur who is not only going to make the idea happen, but spread it across society.

William Foote Founder and CEO, Root Capital; Ashoka Global Fellow Root Capital is best-in-class in the new world of social investment. This nonprofit social investment fund has provided more than $120 million in credit to 235 grassroots enterprises in 30 countries in Latin America and Africa, with an astounding 99-percent repayment rate from our borrowers and a 100-percent repayment rate to investors.

Ask the Experts: How Social Venture Capital Is Changing the World JOEL SOLOMON, TIM FREUNDLICH, JOSH BECKER Commonwealth Club 9/09 Link (Realaudio required).

Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses" (interview 11/12.

Articles

Excellent overview and definition by Stanford's Social Innovation Review's Martin and Osberg. Highly recommended.

Ten Non-Profit Funding Models from SSIR

Design Thinking for Social Innovation from SSIR by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, a global innovation and design firm. He is author of Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (2009), a newly published book about how design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. Also by Jocelyn Wyatt, who leads IDEO’s Social Innovation group.

== Books == (see main Books page)

World Change 2.0: Creating a blueprint for social transformation by Scott Sherman Transformative Action Institute. Highly recommended.

New Rippling: How Social Entrepreneurs Spread Innovation Throughout the World by Beverly Schwartz of Ashoka. http://www.ashoka.org/

Connecting to Change the World: HARNESSING THE POWER OF NETWORKS FOR SOCIAL IMPACT by Peter Plastrik, Madeleine Taylor, and John Cleveland (published by Island Press, go Slugs). 2014.

The Real Problem Solvers: Social Entrepreneurs in America by Ruth A. Shapiro. 2012 (another link).

Short book reviews on the topic.

Worldchanging : a user's guide for the 21st century / edited by Alex Steffen 2006 McHenry Stacks HC79.E5 W676 2006 (newer edition 2011)

Muhammad Yunus: Building Social Business Ventures video preview (Amazon preview) is third book by Professor Yunus, following Banker to the Poor and Creating a World Without Poverty, and is dedicated solely towards the concept of social business, its implementation, and its maintenance.(preview). Founder of Grameen Bank, which makes micro-loans all over the world, empowering people in many ways, not least of which to give them the option on not exhausting their local habitats in order to survive in the short term. Yunus was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize See related videos on right. He has a new book, and a new initiative to bring microlending to the US in order to wipe out predatory payday loans. sort video and 2005 MIT lecture video 2009 talk at Google (video).

How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, by David Bornstein. Oxford UP 2007. Co-author of Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know 2010.

Tactics of Hope includes linksTactics of Hope video offers a brief overview. Website with resources

The power of unreasonable people: how social entrepreneurs create markets By John Elkington, Pamela Hartigan Related books.

The Social Entrepreneur’s Handbook by Rupert Scofield, Cofounder and president of FINCA International—a nonprofit microfinancing institution with 7,000 employees serving 750,000 customers in 21 countries, a social entrepreneur for 40 years. 2011

Local Resources and Funding

See also Cool Classes and Green departments

New! Entrepreneurship chair at UCSC

Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development (CIED) 4/16.more.

The Entrepreneurship Studies Initiative at the School of Engineering at UCSC is offering courses and other activities in entrepreneurship. This initiative was established by Gideon Shaanan (faculty profile) who also develops and teaches a number of entrepreneurship courses.***

UCSC Center for Entrepreneurship is a comprehensive year-long program that could result in funding and company/ngo start-up funding. Facebook page. UCSC Center For Entrepreneurship has internships 10/14.

UCSC Biz Plan competition: 2015 winners include: CareCuts by Caitlin Deigel (B.A. business management economics, 2015), a safe voucher and online method for bringing homeless shelter residents to local salons for haircuts and styling to help them re-enter the workforce. also electric skateboard.

Bus tracking in realtime at UCSC started by students of computer engineering Professor Katia Obrackza, who initially pitched it as a project for undergraduates looking for a senior design project. Another group of students on the project, working with electrical engineering Professor Stephen Petersen, had to figure out the best location for an array of base stations to receive the GPS signals.The web app piece—SlugRoute—was designed by Wade "Simba" Khadder, an undergraduate in computer science who took a prototype to a UCSC Hackathon.

Biology grad wins seed funding for biotech startup company: Antonio Lamb followed his passion for molecular biology, and his biotech startup now has $100,000 in seed funding from the IndieBio EU accelerator program, working on a proof-of-concept project to demonstrate the feasibility of the company's plan to produce oral vaccines for farmed fish using genetically modified microalgae. 6/16 see GMO's.

A team of UC Santa Cruz students has advanced to the regional finals of the million dollar Hult Prize, the world’s largest student competition and start-up platform for social good. Each year the Hult Prize, in partnership with President Bill Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative, challenges students around the world to develop innovative social enterprises that aim to tackle pressing issues faced by billions of people. The winners receive $1 million in seed capital, as well as mentorship and advice from the international business community to launch their newly formed company. 3/15 See Challenges.

Cruz Cares 2015: A Pitch Contest for Social Ventures Organizers 3/15

Hasti Afsarifard, put a 3D printer in spaceWhen the SpaceX Dragon containing a 3-D printer blasted toward the International Space Station last week, it was propelled by more than rocket fuel. It was boosted by the vision of Hasti Afsarifard, a UC Santa Cruz student. That dream sent her to Cape Canaveral, Florida, and it didn't end there. ..She attributes her success to the influence of three Santa Cruz incubators: The University of California, MakersFactory 3-D printing and teaching company and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.10/14. launch video.

Annual Hackathon: On January 9-11, 2015, over 300 programmers, designers, and tech enthusiasts will gather to unleash their creativity during a two-and-a-half day hackathon. 25 bucks for students includes food. 10K in prozes; you do not need to be a coder. Talks on entrepreneurship. link. Organized by Brent Haddad et al.

Janneke Lang Social Entrepreneurship UCSC alum, organized Cruz Cares Pitch competition ($10K).

Civinomics is a technology start-up based in Santa Cruz, founded in 2011 by UCSC GenY-ers who are passionate about being involved in their government and social institutions and making them better. They offer a free crowd-sourcing platform hosted on civinomics.com, tablet based polling and survey research, and media based online polling.

Rob Forbes (aesthetic studies from Porter 1974). PUBLIC urban bike design company; every bike he sells is a consumer good and a purchase for the public good.

Ezequiel Ezequiel Olvera Jr., (Oakes College, 2005) founded and runs the Gumball Foundation, a social entrepreneurial venture that teaches the values of creativity and entrepreneurship while helping students earn money for college. Using a hands-on approach, Olvera partners the students with local small businesses and corporate offices to manage their micro-venture. He is also a lifetime member of the UCSC alumni association and part of UC Santa Cruz 50th Anniversary Leadership Committee, UC Santa Cruz Social Science Board.

Paul Lubeck leads the Everette program (formerly GIIP), whose goal is create a new generation of “info-savvy” advocates using information technology to overcome informational exclusion.

Impact Designs: Engineering and Sustainability through Student Service (IDEASS), is a year-long (3-quarter) upper division service-learning course that is designed to improve science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills while developing students as change agents savvy to the sustainability challenges that will define the 21st Century. Contact James Barsimantov and Tamara Ball at ideass@ucsc.edu for more information.

Suresh Lodha teaches CMPS 80J: Technology Targeted for Social Issues and CMPS 80S: From Software Innovation to Social Enterpreneurship.

Video overview of Santa Cruz entrepreneur and design support,Dessign Santa Cruz (contact student coordinator, larae@ucsc.edu. Center phone 420.6414). It hosts a business plan competition. Top prize $4,000 2013 winners. (McKercher students won 2 of 4 years). John Skardon (jskardon@soe.ucsc.edu) is mentor.

Monthly Tech Meetup in Santa Cruz .

Y Combinator does seed funding for startups. Seed funding is the earliest stage of venture funding. It pays your expenses while you're getting started and provides a boot camp.

Santa Cruz Tech Beat is a news digest for folks who want to know and share what’s up in the Santa Cruz technology and maker community. Run by Slug Sara Isenberg, the Founder, Editor-in-Chief, and Publisher of Santa Cruz Tech Beat. She does this for the benefit of the extended business and technology community.

Chris Yonge is principal of StudioCruz, a 3D design and communication group based in Santa Cruz that serves the central California region. StudioCruz specializes in fast moving consumer, medical, and litigation product design/development as well as visualization and rapid 3D prototyping. TEDx SC talk: Yonge describes how 3D printing, open source design tools, new communication technologies, and crowd source funding will completely revolution our relationships with objects.

TEDX Santa Cruz examples list 2014

Santa Clara U Frugal Innovation Lab develops accessible, affordable, adaptable, and appropriate technologies, products and solutions to address human needs in emerging markets, and work with social entrepreneurs around the world.

See also Design Challenges and Scholarships and Funding for seed money and mentoring.