Category: Articles
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Kiva.org – A Model for West Virginia?
Let’s face it, West Virginia needs to dramatically spark our level of entrepreneurship. It’s a pretty open secret that our dependence on both government and extractive industry over the decades has not exactly trained ourselves to think in innovative ways towards wealth creation. Several organizations and volunteers have been working hard to change the awareness…
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Filling Our Tech Entrepreneur Pipeline
West Virginia has been called out in several “new economy” state rankings for its lack of vibrant high tech entrepreneurship culture. To address this issue, some key organizations in West Virginia have developed a program to jump-start the number of entrepreneurs in this area. We encourage you to consider participating or sharing with contacts inside…
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Happy 25th Anniversary Mountain Stage – And Thank You!
Last night, the West Virginia Public Radio program Mountain Stage celebrated its 25th anniversary. The history of Mountain Stage is pretty well documented. But in addition to congratulating Larry Groce, Andy Ridenour and the rest of the production team, we wanted to highlight Mountain Stage as an example for new economy growth and building creative…
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Mining Talent From Former Natives
We’ve posted several times about the need to re-stock our talent pipeline with new economy-savvy workers and entrepreneurs. It’s a very tough chicken-and-egg dilemma. How do you attract talent without the jobs, and how do you build companies without the talent? One low-hanging fruit tactic of course is to lure people who already have a…
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Eastern Panhandle Innovation Center (Epicenter) Opens in Martinsburg
An exciting grand opening of the Eastern Panhandle Innovatin Cener, known as Epicenter, is being held on December 12 in Martinsburg. It’s great to see this kind of mixed use facility being launched. Better yet, it is great to see that it is an historic, restored building. You are invited to the celebration event: CITY…
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WV Hip Hop State of the Union
Create WV team member and diversity track leader Crystal Good Nazario shared this historical look into West Virginia’s hip hop history in Graffiti, West Virginia’s monthly entertainment newspaper: West Virginia has a certain image that isn’t necessarily helping it in the global economy where talented, skilled people can live and work anywhere they want. Studies show…
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President-Elect Obama, West Virginia, and Opportunity
Regardless of where your politics sits or how your candidate came out of last night’s election, we all have to take a moment to ponder the historic significance of electing a person with a new skin tone and a completely unique name. Who, just a couple of years ago, would have predicted President-Elect Barack Obama?…
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Scenes from Create WV 2008
We wanted to share the success of the 2008 Create WV Conference with those who could not attend in hopes you can join us next year. PDF and PowerPoint files will be found on www.createwv.com/conference shortly, but for now here are some fun sights from the conference: Reverend Matthew Watts of Charleston Keynote presentation in…
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Mission WV Continues to Build West Virginia Tech Literacy
An exciting announcement was made at the Create WV conference last week in Snowshoe – Microsoft awarded their third grant of $625,000 in cash and software to Mission WV, a non-profit organization dedicated to delivery a number of social services to West Virginians, not least of which is hands-on PC technology training. Microsoft was also a…
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Where Do Candidates Stand on the Arts?
This year Arts Advocacy of West Virginia conducted its first candidate survey with very positive results. The survey was designed to increase awareness of the arts as a legislative issue and to place major issues confronting the arts industry in the front of candidates’ minds. A resounding 93.5% responded that they believed that the arts…