Background on Minnesota’s presence
at
BIO 2008 and the new
“Culture of Innovation” brand
A strengthening partnership between the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED), Life Science Alley, Mayo Clinic, University of Minnesota and BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota are providing much of the leadership to create a Minnesota “bio brand” that will help others (and frankly ourselves) know more about Minnesota’s world-class capabilities.
Many of the elements of the new brand, “Positively Minnesota: Culture of Innovation,” are being launched at this year’s BIO 2008 show in San Diego from June 16-20, 2008.
This new brand will be carried throughout almost every aspect of the Minnesota Pavilion including the overall marketing, trade show floor presentation area, seven Circle of Innovation stations, and an interactive kiosk.
Exciting “firsts for us” include a statewide focus that highlights Minnesota’s world-class capabilities in seven key areas including medical devices, pharma/biologics, animal health, renewables (including renewable energy and renewable bio-materials), biomedical and health research, innovation and commercialization infrastructure and the University of Minnesota.
Each of the seven areas will have an innovation station in the Circle of Innovation. The team has just finalized the fact sheets that highlight Minnesota’s world-class assets for each area including key industry facts, research capabilities and top companies.
The presentation area will highlight theme hours for most of the Circle of Innovation areas including: renewables, biomedical and health research, pharma/biologics, medical devices and animal health (including food). At this time, the University of Minnesota assets will be included the other themes. Innovation and Commercialization Infrastructure will not be highlighted in the presentation schedule.
The interactive kiosk is being created by the BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota and will utilize Google Earth technology to show Minnesota’s bio assets to the world. Each data point will show the capability’s location in Minnesota based on their street address. Additionally, each data point will have a brief overview to the company and a link to their website. We believe this visual representation of a region’s bio-related assets will be the first of its kind in the world.
One final addition for this year is a specific focus on emerging companies. Up to six companies are going to be highlighted to demonstrate the success that smaller companies can have in Minnesota. Minnesota’s entrepreneurial spirit is very much alive and hopefully we can demonstrate to the world some of our world class emerging companies.