The renamed Brown Enterprise Forum will take a slightly different, though slightly
broadened, approach when it begins its latest calendar of events with a nanotechnology
conference at The Westin Hotel on Sept. 23.
The forum’s new director, Charles F.M. Kingdon, was named vice president for technology partnerships at Brown Technology Partnerships last November. He said while the former Brown Venture Forum has been well run over the course of the last two decades, he saw an opportunity to make it “bigger and better.”
“We want to broaden things a little,” Kingdon said. “Anybody who has a desire to network is encouraged to attend. … We want to see entrepreneurs take technology into existing companies, but we’re also looking at this as social enterprise, for people who want to share their knowledge for the benefit of the community.”
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The hope is that this year’s slate of events will involve as many players from around the state as possible, including the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, the University of Rhode Island, the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, all of the Slater centers and a variety of other industry participants.
Forum events will continue to concentrate on high-tech issues while providing networking opportunities, which Kingdon said is the forum’s greatest strength. The first event, focusing on nanotechnology and scheduled for Sept. 23 at 1 p.m., will be held at The Westin Hotel. As usual, a networking reception will follow the event.
Kingdon said the hope is that the forum will truly become a statewide event, moving to other locations beyond the Brown campus, such as Kingston and Newport, and hopefully going into some of the state’s larger companies.
Several of the programs on last year’s schedule focused on the ironing out of details in companies signing on for venture capital funding and the importance of having a solid business plan and management team in place. Kingdon said he plans that those sorts of forums, where attendance fluctuated between 100 and 250 participants, will continue.
“We’re still looking to bring together people with experience in a particular domain and get them in front of investors and financiers,” said Kingdon, who had previously served as the program director for Life Sciences at the Center for Exploitations of Science and Technology in Britain. He has more than 25 years of experience in matching technologies with investors and industries.
Kingdon said another event in the series would probably focus on acoustic technologies, a field in which the state has a number of startup companies with emerging technologies.
The forum’s new Web site, www.brownenterpriseforum.org, should be fully completed soon, although information about the nanotechnology conference has already been posted. Kingdon said the idea for the conference had actually come from people within the state, working in the industry, who requested a nanotechnology event.
Dr. Thomas Cellucci, president and COO of Texas-based Zyvex Corp., will be the keynote speaker for the Sept. 23 event. Zyvex is a nano-manufacturing company that is designing a machine to manipulate parts at the microscopic level. The plan is to eventually use the machine to build machines that will operate on the molecular level.
Cellucci is the founder, president and CEO of Wellesley, Mass.-based Cellucci
Associates Inc., an international high-tech management consulting firm. A number
of professors from Brown and URI, as well as venture capitalists, will also
participate in a panel discussion. Saul Kaplan, director of business development
at the state’s EDC, will serve as moderator.
