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Lowcountry innovation: Fact or fiction?
Editor's Notes
By Bob Bouyea
Ever watch the Discovery Channel show “MythBusters”? Each week special-effects experts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman try to separate fact from urban legend. Their methods usually entail blowing something up.
More times then not, they bust the myth, saying it is highly improbable. In one episode, they tackled the myth that if you are in a free falling elevator, you will be saved by jumping right before the elevator hits the ground.
After preparing an old elevator to freefall nine stories and rigging their stunt dummy “Buster” to leap prior to impact, they found that while your velocity slowed a bit, by a few miles per hour, you still would not survive the fall. Therefore, that myth was busted.
Several months ago here at the Business Journal, we set out to tackle a myth of our own—there aren’t any innovators in the Lowcountry.
To determine whether this was fact or fiction, we put a call out across the area for nominations. We sought local companies or individuals who have created new products, services, programs or processes that were created or introduced in South Carolina. (No explosions were necessary.)
What we got in return was nearly 50 nominations from which 10 were chosen and honored recently at the Dock Street Theatre as Innovators 2005.
There are people here in the Lowcountry creating new products, services and processes that impact their industry or our community, even though little is known about what these companies are doing.
While we recognized 10 winners, which were selected by a panel of five judges who scored each nomination in the categories of Originality, Power, Challenge and Value, there are many others that deserve mentioning. Here is a sprinkling of some of the other nominations:
Charleston Miracle League
This organization provides recreational activities for children with mental and/or physical disabilities. The group built a specially designed state-of-the-art, rubberized surface baseball field and established a formal league for the children. The result is the children gained self-confidence, which translates into improved academics, improved coordination and enhanced their social skills.
Corporate DevelopMint
Corporate DevelopMint, a fundraising consulting firm widely known by charitable organizations throughout the Southeast, created a system to help nonprofit health care organizations—hospital administrators, foundation boards and medical staff—solve the complex challenges of growing philanthropic support.
STEALTH Concealment Solutions Inc.
This company developed a low-cost, faux pine tree concealment product that is specifically designed to hide cell phone antennas for the wireless carriers. Demand for these products is on the rise in an effort to help blend the antennas into the environment. The company designs and manufactures the antennas at its North Charleston location.
Charleston Marketing Group
This company created a retirement tool, Your Second Life.org, that doesn’t focus on the financial needs but rather on the emotional concerns of retirement. It developed a Web site, www.yoursecondlife.org, on which future retirees fill out a 66-question personality profile. In seconds, a five-page printout is produced analyzing your retirement type and lifestyle, including where to live, whether to work and things to do in retirement—all for free.
Trident United Way
Trident United Way has transformed itself from a fundraising organization that simply raises funds and passes the money along to other nonprofit organizations into an agency that responds to the needs of the Lowcountry’s citizens. The distribution of funds is determined through an analysis of the degree to which each agency applying for funding is supporting the overall community goals set by TUW. And TUW can assess which needs are closest to being met and which require more intervention.
Based on the evidence we have found, this myth is busted.
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