Vermont launches Innovation Marketplace

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(Host) Even in the middle of a recession, entrepreneurs are coming up with ideas that might help a struggling business.

Getting them implemented, though, can be a challenge.

As VPR’s Ross Sneyd reports, the federal government is working with Vermont and four other states to make the concepts reality.

(Sneyd) The U.S. Commerce Department wants to create “National Innovation Marketplaces.”

These would be clearing houses where somebody who has a good idea for a new product or a manufacturing procedure could connect with the company that could actually produce it.

Vermont just launched its own Innovation Marketplace, one of just five around the country right now. Bob Zider is director of the Vermont Manufacturing Extension Center, where the marketplace concept is being tested.

(Zider) “So what we’re really doing is setting up this marketplace to make the connections and that’s it’s all about.”

(Sneyd) Zider says a lot of good ideas are developed in a garage or even a laboratory for making a better widget.

But he says too often, those innovations never emerge from the workshop because entrepreneurs don’t know how to market them.

State-based Innovation Marketplaces are intended to bridge the gap between bright ideas and new products through a new Web-based directory.

People with the ideas will register with the directory and so will the companies on the lookout for cheaper or better ways to do business.

Zider says the computer essentially will make the introductions.

(Zider) “What this is really going to do is accelerate significantly, hopefully, the communication, development and sales of new technologies and new innovations.”

(Sneyd) Organizers of the Innovation Marketplaces say they should be especially valuable in the current economy.

A recent study by Georgia Tech found that companies that rely on innovative products or processes to compete have an average profit margin that’s 50 percent higher than other businesses.

For VPR News, I’m Ross Sneyd.

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