Thanks to the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, the creative coalition behind InnovationErie: Design Competition will offer a cash award ten times larger than announced when the regional contest to promote creative product concepts invited entries last month.
The bump-up of the top prize to $10,000 for northwest Pennsylvania’s hungry industrial designers comes through the deft hand of Edinboro University, an organizer of the competition.
The university’s liberal arts school captured the grant from a state higher education program that assists the creation of businesses created from art. The award will marry InnovationErie to Edinboro’s parallel plan to launch an incubator called StARTup.
In September, that latter project obtained a pair of buildings in nearby Waterford, on an option without cost for three years, as a site where the university will encourage artists to launch businesses that offer creative design to manufacturing.
Edinboro’s Liberal Arts Dean Terry Smith describes the incubator, which is targeted to open in the first half of 2009, as a place where artists can step into the business world by receiving “the kind of financial counseling and support they need to turn a good art-based idea into a good art-based business.”
Winners of the top prize for InnovationErie’s design competition, which seeks to stimulate ideas for products with distinctive appeal that can be manufactured in the region, will thus also have a place where they can house their business. According to Dean Smith, “The cash prize must be used for equipment and services to begin an art-based business at the StARTup Incubator.”
For more information about the competition, go here and here.
Source: InnovationErie, Tammy Roche
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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