Hurdles?
Barriers?
We're FLYING over them.
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Creative Flight #1/
We're Building Agile Incubators
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Flexible, fast, and affordable workspace you can rent for an hour or for a month. Yes, it's all finally coming to Dearborn. In just minutes you can rent a desk, a conference room, or even an auditorium. We're forging a partnership with LiquidSpace, a web and app platform that lets you rent exactly what you need, and allows businesses - coffee shops, hotels, office buildings, and even restaurants and bars - a chance to rent their under-used or awesome-to-use spaces.
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Why?
Because we as city know the "future of work" should mean taking care of you: the work-from-anywhere freelancers, out-of-town-desk hunters, and sky's-the-limit entrepreneurs all needing wifi, a flat surface, and ah yes, coffee.
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Hurdle We're Jumping:
No Space or Funding in the Foreseeable Future.
So we want to be a hotspot for entrepreneurs, creatives, and freelancers, but where do all these innovators go to work, to be inspired, or find support? How can we attract and keep this talent in our downtowns when we don't have a dedicated space or funding to kickstart and operate an incubator? Since there's literally an app for that, we're going to use it.
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What Could Help
Funding to grow our LiquidSpacers to give them a small discount on workspace rent. A small bit of funding could help us launch a few innovation-driving events to support them. And we'll need a small marketing push to get the word out.
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Creative Flight #2/
We're Connecting the Disconnected
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People would love to connect to the people and resources they really want and need, but sometimes it won't happen by accident. As we grow our entrepreneurial ecosystem, we want to finding unexpected ways to connect and design collaboration between all kinds of resource partners - organizations, corporations, city stakeholders, entrepreneurs and ambitious residents.
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Why?
Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. Penn and Teller. Lucy and Ethel. All were fine alone but let's just say it - so much better together.
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Hurdle We're Jumping:
Designing Collaboration is Messy
It would be awesome to think that we could connect people, resources, organizations, and corporations, politely decide that we all perfectly align in vision, mission, values and goals, and then boom - Party! Magic! Magic Party! But in reality, everyone has protected interests, priorities, targets, and respectable and very real constraints. This means that designing collaboration is itself a full-court press and requires dedicated commitment from someone or some organization. Why? Because whether you're a billion dollar company or a bootstrapping entrepreneur - everyone feels stretched thin. So designing collaboration actually requires a designer, that strong hub at the center of the spoke, who by nature is ecosystem-minded, agile, and able to navigate the often competitive and conflicting waters of collaboration and communicate the same message in understandable ways to different groups and people.
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What Could Really Help
Our city is chock full of disruptive doers, future-minded designers, and human-centered educators. It would be amazing to leverage our hometown talent and their meta-organizational design ninja skills to help us learn HOW to connect, converse, and really work together like never before.
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Creative Flight #3/
We're Sparking Imagination, Inviting Experimentation, Believing in the Agency of People
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It's one thing to proclaim we want to be an innovative city. It's a whole other thing to really be an innovative city. And at its core, being an innovative city is about actually celebrating your innovators, listening carefully to what they have to say and to what they need, and then giving them opportunities to make an impact. If we say we're an innovative city cheering on people who dare to ask "what if we...?" It means that we as a city have to ask ourselves: "What if we...encouraged those who are dreaming big to just try." What if no matter what demographic, no matter what age, no matter what anything - we rallied together and chanted and cheered on our creative doers and didn't just give them a seat at our table, but let them build the table and then ask if we can pull up a seat.
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Why?
As a city, we can't do everything, but we can help lower the real and perceptual barriers that keep people from simply trying. We should set up metaphorical microphones in every corner of the city and leverage every techie or old-school tool we can find (like, talking and listening to each other) to get people connected and willing to speak their audacious ideas out loud. Can't we find some public spaces needing new life breathed into them? Perhaps music or food or games and poetry or art? If a public space is unused or underused, let's prod people to imagine a future in which they have real agency in their city to experiment with places that in truth belong to them. And then tell them "surprise!" That future is now, and its ours to create.
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Hurdle We're Jumping:
The city of Dearborn, like every city, has finite resources; it's hard to relinquish creative control; culture can't be programmed
It's ironic that city agencies and organizations have finite resources, yet imagination and human potential is infinite. It's as much logic as it is idealism, that we can turn to our greatest, most valuable, most undertapped resource (people), and not only ask them to participate in the flourishing development and culture of their city, but to be the driving agents of both.
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What Could Really Help
Control in the hands of a few and rules-based tradition flies in the face of what innovation and innovators need and crave. This is a mind shift, a perspective shift, and a culture shift, and all take time, moderation, and a framework to understand and explain them (cue: design-thinking educators and big teaming researchers). Identifying public and private gathering spaces where people can experiment with ideas, play music, exhibit art, share meals, test products, and get real feedback will be a great start. We're seeking partnership and endorsement from city agencies and foundations with influence over public spaces, as well as from landlords, business owners, and those who can offer gathering or pop-up spaces to entrepreneurs at a subsidized rate, or perhaps for free.
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Creative Flight #4/
We're Creating Experiences People Can Feel
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We're launching cool new experiences and spotlighting those already offered. Starting soon, we'll be piloting Dearborn Experience Tours, and Dearborn to Corktown Experience Tours. These aren't your typical double-decker fall-asleep-as-we-talk tours. These are real life get off the bus and try this out experience tours. Art + Design. Innovation + Inspiration. Hidden Treasures and Lost Gems. Michigan Ave: Past & Future. Mobility Corridor. Follow Ford's Footsteps. Brews + Chews. Small Shop Stops. Celebrating Diversity, Family, Friends, and Food. You get the point. These tours are going to be awesome, affordable, and. We can't think of another a. We'll say awesome again.
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Why?
Because flex work spaces, collaboration, and experimental placemaking are all awesomely creative solutions towards building a more inclusive, innovative city - we just cannot forget our human craving for concrete and visceral experiences - to trust and remember what we can touch, hear, smell, taste, and experience in community with others.
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Hurdle We're Jumping:
People can't quite put a finger on what Dearborn "is."
And rightly so, right? Dearborn is a lot of things, and not the same thing to every person, and not just one thing, but not everything people think it is, yet - so much more. Yes, we get it. We need Dearborn Experience Tours, not just because they will be an economic firecracker, but because they'll help us create frameworks of understanding of who we are. Of our rich and diverse history, and the gem of who we are right now - our living history and all the people, places and stories just waiting to be told. And finally, these tours help navigate us towards a better understanding of where we're heading, and why, and how many different and creative and unheard of ways we can all get there. Different tours, different paths, different times, different people. But beautifully, together.
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What Could Really Help
Funding. Support. People willing to literally jump on the bus and go and try and experience and then tell us exactly what they think and exactly what needs to happen to make this beyond just "that was ok." We need marketing help to get the word out. To Detroiters. To Downriverers. To travelers and localists. And we need dynamo guides who can easyspeak to different crowds and elevate "that was ok" to "that's something I'll never forget."
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Creative Flight #5 /
We're Starting Start Lab
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Innovation, entrepreneurship, arts, and culture are about to take off in Dearborn, and Start Lab is going to be the rocket. It's just - we haven't yet built the rocket, and no one's giving us the real estate to build one. So ok. We'll just fire up its digital version, gather up creatives and entrepreneurs, listen, adapt, and keep blasting forward. Start Lab’s mission is to inspire, connect, and foster a new generation of big thinkers, entrepreneurs, and creatives to drive the economic and cultural comeback in Dearborn.
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Why?
Because we need a resource hub that offers entrepreneurs and artists a simple way to learn about, plug into and navigate the extraordinary business and cultural resources in Dearborn and beyond. We need a real-time map of our growing entrepreneurial ecosystem in Dearborn and across Metro Detroit. And we need a conduit that harnesses untapped synergy between multiple community stakeholders through relationship building, constant strategic coordination, transparent communication, clear frameworks, and a lot of boots-on-the ground hard work.
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What Could Really Help
People to raise their hands to be a professional mentor or business coach over coffee for some of our entrepreneurs. We need public and private space owners to unregulate for a bit and let us do some programming and events in your space, like networking events, or mentorship matches, or microfunding nights, and so on. We wouldn't cry if a big hometown corporate sponsor would be willing to offer us some space and resources so we can build our rocket and launch to the moon, or at least, scoot, shuttle, or autonomously navigate there.
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