Posted February 25, 2016 at 09:56am by Martin Langeveld
Tech Salad: A farm-food-tech meetup to discover new business opportunities
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Could your farm or food business benefit from more collaboration with our regional friends in the technology sector?
We invite you to join us for TECH SALAD — a workshop bringing together Windham County (VT) farm/food sector entrepreneurs and technology entrepreneurs, in order to explore opportunities for ways in which these sectors can work together and solve problems, including new methods, new markets, new products, and potentially whole new businesses.
Tech Salad takes place on Thursday, March 3 at 5:30 p.m. at the Robert H. Gibson River Garden, downtown Brattleboro. We'll be gathering together entrepreneurs from the Windham County food and agriculture sector, together with members of the Brattleboro Area Tech group, a network of digital entrepreneurs and experts.
Tech Salad is the first of several such workshops we are planning in order to connect farm and food entrepreneurs with members of various other sectors. The next one will be for farm/food businesses to interact with green building industry entrepreneurs on March 29, and we are planning meetups involving farm/food, marketing and logistics entrepreneurs on dates to be announced.
The purpose of the event is for people to interact and engage in order to discover new business and collaboration opportunities made possible by the shared interests and challenges of each sector. Bring your thoughts about what you would like to change or do better in your business, and we'll brainstorm ways in which solutions from the tech sector could help. And perhaps, we'll find ways in which farm/food businesses can help the tech sector, as well!
The event will be facilitated by Nadav Malin, president of BuildingGreen, Inc., a Brattleboro consultancy that gathers, organizes and publishes information about green building technologies for building industry professional and policy makers.
These workshops are the first phase of Windham Grows, a new Stroll program designed to help launch and grow businesses in the Windham County farm and food sector. Windham Grows is being developed as a successor to the Farm/Food Business Planning Competition we have organized for many years. In Windham Grows, rather than receiving a check for a winning business plan, competitively-selected businesses will receive custom-tailored packages of mentoring and resources over a period of six to nine months, to help them through the startup or scale-up stage of their business.
We hope that the outcome of Tech Salad will be a prioritized list of specific opportunities that participants can pursue with the support and resources that Strolling of the Heifers can bring to the table through Windham Grows. We're hoping that this meeting results in a handful of innovative ideas involving farms, food and technology, and that specific teams are identified to champion and develop those ideas.
Pizza and salad will be served at the meeting, which is free and open to any entrepreneurs in the Windham County food, agriculture or technology sectors.
To attend, please pre-register at www.strollingoftheheifers.com/techsalad/. (Or you can register by phone by calling us at the River Garden at 802-246-0982.)
If you have any questions, please email or give a call! We hope to see you on March 3.