Hawaii isn't the first place that springs to mind when one thinks about entrepreneurship, but it has more surprises than I expected. A half-dizen meetings were arranged by Dr. Bee-Leng Chua at Hawaii Pacific University, who has been the lead organizer for Global Entrepreneurship Week in Hawaii. No time for snorkeling this trip!
Russel Cheng gave me a tour of Oceanit, a tech firm located in downtown Honolulu that spins off baby tech firms once or twice a year from its R&D business model. The company's workforce is 25 percent STEM Ph.D.s, and they have studiously avoided operational models to focus on creative applications of different scanning and surveillance technology. Beds that can monitor a patient's heartbeat and respiration unintrusively (or a baby's). Ants that can be dropped from the air and detect dangerous substances. X-ray vision. Heads up, young techies, Oceanit would love to see your job application.
Dr. Rob Yonover is an independent inventor who is a little crazy and a lot brilliant. He's been cranky out one weird invention after another for years, all in the space of survival gear. He's caught the attention of the military, and in the process sold new gear to save people's lives in rescue situations, even a portable desalination device.
The most heartening visit was with three entrepreneurs at Yuka Nagashima's incubator at the University of Hawaii (the High technology Development Corporation). The first presenter, Dr. Adelheid Kuehnle is a tenured biotech scientist who is launching an altenrative energy company that you can only dream about - using algae to grow jet fuel.
An incubator is a tough institution to model properly, but Yuka is a former entrep and is building a role model. I learned a lot about the unique challenges facing Hawaii. Consider how the Internet opened up possibilities for the knowledge economy to blossom here by linking the islands to researchers on the mainland. Consider the attractiveness for a tech community in the physical environment. Yet Honolulu faces the same funding challenge as the flyover Midwest -- VCs eventually pull local protfolio companies back into their orbits in San Jose or Austin. The "Broadway Joe" problem. So Hawaii is struggling to build a gravity well of tech talent.
Talking to David Leung, President (and I think founder) of Ikayzo, I learned that his very savvy firm not only started here, but was started by engineers who wanted to move here specifically to start their technology company. Ikayzo developed a private-label social network app and is launching a public Beta in a few weeks based on the technology called OOI. If you can get guys like David Leung, you are doing something right with your development strategy.
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