Innovation Fellows make strides on ambitious plans

SELLING POINT: Soren Ryherd, president of Working Planet Marketing Group, is spearheading the Retail Project, which has launched two online brands so far: upscale pet boutique Felix Chien and urban-gardening supplier Urbilis. / COURTESY STEW MILNE
SELLING POINT: Soren Ryherd, president of Working Planet Marketing Group, is spearheading the Retail Project, which has launched two online brands so far: upscale pet boutique Felix Chien and urban-gardening supplier Urbilis. / COURTESY STEW MILNE

To win a competition seeking the greatest possible good for the most people, The Rhode Island Foundation Innovation Fellows Allan Tear and Soren Ryherd had to be ambitious.
Tear, a co-founder of technology-startup-accelerator Betaspring, pitched a set of similar entrepreneurial hubs for Ocean State creative industries in design, food, social ventures and advanced manufacturing.
Ryherd, president of Working Planet Marketing Group Inc., pitched creating up to 40 new, online retail brands that would eventually fill vacant storefronts throughout the state.
As an economic experiment, seeing whether the two winners can deliver their plans on the $300,000 The Rhode Island Foundation promised over three years could be valuable and instructive in its own right.
“I joked to [Rhode Island Foundation President and CEO] Neil Steinberg that I had won $300,000 to do $1 million worth of work,” Tear said about the fellowship. “This is meant to be catalyst money.”
A year after the fellowships were awarded, both Tear and Ryherd have made significant progress toward their goals and both still have a long way to go.
Called Rally Rhode Island, Tear’s creative-economy, community-building project is tracing the path he took from the Providence Geeks group into Betaspring and more recently the Founders League entrepreneurship consortium.
The first step is to introduce enough motivated people in each creative sector to each other until they form a self-sustaining group. Then volunteer leaders emerge to organize entrepreneurial “strategic experiments” and the group reaches critical mass.
If the group becomes large enough, the hope is that it can either evolve into or spinoff a startup-incubation arm.
So far the process is progressing at different paces in each of the four industry sectors Rally RI is targeting.
The fastest progress is in the art and design space, for which Tear has organized a monthly community-gathering series called Clambake, which is drawing at least 100 people to hear industry leaders talk at each event.
Matthew Grigsby, co-founder of Providence-based industrial-design consultancy Ecolect Inc., has stepped up as the volunteer leader of the Clambake group. In the social ventures sphere, Rally RI has set up a group called Faces, which hasn’t reached the same size as Clambake, but also has a leader in Kelly Ramirez, executive director of Social Venture Partners Rhode Island. (Social ventures are nonprofits that generate revenue from sales or for-profits with a social mission.)
Getting groups together in the food-and-drink and advanced-manufacturing worlds has been slower. Rally RI is still in the community-building stage for both.
Tear hopes to have community venues established in food by the end of spring and advanced manufacturing by the end of summer.
As an example of the strategic experiments Tear said he is looking at is a potential culinary-centered WaterFire lighting.
A year after starting the Rally RI project, Tear said the biggest surprise he encountered was that even in such a small state, many top entrepreneurs and creative talents didn’t already know each other.
“It is amazing how many people don’t know about what someone else is doing in the same field a block down the street,” Tear said.
At the Retail Project, Ryherd has launched two online brands so far: upscale pet boutique Felix Chien and urban-gardening supplier Urbilis. The project is working on the launch of its third brand this spring and fourth by the end of summer.
That pace is somewhat behind the six brands Ryherd first estimated would exist by the end of 2012, but he said once the project is fully scaled up it should still be launching 40 new brands each year.
Like RallyRI, 2013 shapes up as a key time for the Retail Project, as it adds dedicated staff, accelerates brand launches and eyes the first brick-and-mortar opening by the end of the year.
“Right now we have one team running both brands, and we are a lean startup needing to maximize resources,” Ryherd said. “We are just bringing on a second full-time person in addition to a brand manager and intern, and will be bringing on a third full time in June.” While acknowledging that both Felix Chien and Urbilis are still pre-profit, Ryherd said he is encouraged that both are generating orders from outside of Rhode Island, the key to a successful Internet sales operation.
The Retail Project model doesn’t expect all of the brands will be successful, but that those that are will sustain new launches and provide data and experiences to inform the others.
Unlike relying on paid advertising as traditional merchants have, Retail Project brands are focused on free social media, which has lower direct cost but requires more time and effort.
Like RallyRI, to reach its ultimate goal the Retail Project is going to need more than the $300,000 from the Innovation Fellowship and is looking to raise money to supplement sales revenue.
As the Retail Project and RallyRI look to hit the next level, The Rhode Island Foundation this month is watching their progress as it prepares to award the next two Innovation Fellowships. The 2013 Fellows were expected to be announced on April 16.
“Looking back on the fellowships, we have been very impressed with the progress they have made and level of activity,” said Jessica David, vice president of strategy and public affairs for the foundation. “We are still a long way to seeing what ultimately comes out of them.”
For its second round of fellowships, the foundation kept the same open-program guidelines – any idea that promises to do the most long-term good for state residents – but has received a smaller, more-focused pool of applicants. Last year there were 438 applications and this year 184.
The foundation hasn’t promoted this year’s fellowships as aggressively as the first year and David said applicants appear to have a better idea of what kind of ideas might work.
Overall, the interest in the fellowships and the creativity shown in the ideas have been impressive, she said.
“We are much more aware that there are people who have ideas to make the state better, and when you ask for them, they are willing to share,” David said.
“There are a lot of good things happening and we are trying to connect them,” she said. •

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