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Women’s History Month: Women Leaders On The Power Of Sharing Your Story
According to Bizzabo, two-thirds of all conference speakers are men. This leaves women out of important career and business opportunities, because speaking is a path to pay equity, equal funding for women-founded companies, and more women in the board room and C-suite, says Bobbie Carlton, founder of Innovation Women. Carlton says she made it her mission to get more women speaking opportunities after having a job that placed speakers on stages for nearly 40 years, and not having a single woman client in the first 20 years of her career.
Mass. Innovation Nights returns after 6-year hiatus with Museum of Science partnership
For 11 years, Massachusetts Innovation Nights hosted an in-person pitch-and-networking event every month—until the pandemic hit.
While Covid kept everyone indoors, that 11-year streak came to an end. Eventually, its online events also came to a halt, and Mass. Innovation Nights went into hibernation.
Now, more than six years after its last event, Mass. Innovation Nights is making its in-person comeback.
Before its hiatus, the series of events was a free, monthly product‑launch showcase where Boston‑area startups and established companies could debut new products, get visibility through social media, and connect with the broader innovation community.
The event series will return to the Museum of Science on April 15, as part of a continued partnership that will run through the rest of the year.
FORGE awards grants to help Connecticut startups move from prototype to production
STRATFORD — From a spare room in their New Haven apartment, Clémence Bruguier and her boyfriend developed two medical devices they hope will revolutionize breast care.
“It’s very simple, it’s very cheap, because we want people to be able to use it often at scale,” Bruguier said of their first marketed product, a nitrile cup that helps women do more thorough breast checks at home.On Thursday, Bruguier walked away with a $62,978 check from manufacturing accelerator FORGE to help her company, Mirabelle Medical, get to the next level.
“This funding is literally life-changing,” Bruguier said. “We’re going to go from our five prototypes to being able to create our products and send them to our customers.”
On Thursday, Bruguier walked away with a $62,978 check from manufacturing accelerator FORGE to help her company, Mirabelle Medical, get to the next level.
“This funding is literally life-changing,” Bruguier said. “We’re going to go from our five prototypes to being able to create our products and send them to our customers.”
Mirabelle Medical was one of three startups to receive Make It Here: CT Product Development Grant awards from FORGE after the most competitive contest ever in the nonprofit’s three-year history in Connecticut, President Laura Teicher said.
This CT nonprofit is getting startups through the ‘valley of death’
FORGE, Dellal says, was crucial to providing early developmental advice. The organization also provided funding, giving Floe some financial support after the startup won an audience choice award at a manufacturing and innovation showcase in 2020.
So when Dellal and another Floe executive moved to Connecticut to start their engineering Ph.D.s at Yale, the startup CEO was worried that leaving Massachusetts and FORGE would become a setback for the business.
Fate, however, had different plans. FORGE announced a move into Connecticut in 2023, spreading its work helping startups and other companies further into New England. In the years since, the organization has partnered with the state’s Office of Manufacturing to support startups in an effort to fix a trio of connected issues: boosting Connecticut’s manufacturing industry among young workers, helping provide advice and support to innovators working with emerging technologies, and providing funding to early stage CT-based startups that often struggle to access capital and make the leap into local manufacturing and, ideally, full-scale production.