When remodeling a kitchen, people usually rely on friends for advice on contractors and architects. Brides use websites and friends as resources when planning their wedding. Entrepreneurs Brian Verne and Mike Eppich figured: Why not create a place where athletes can get advice on apparel?

So Verne and Eppich created Phenom, a mobile app where athletes can brag about the apparel and equipment they use to train. “Influences have a place,” says Verne. “Athl... Read more >

Startups @ City Club is a new collaborative effort between the City Club of Cleveland  and the Cleveland Startup Collective to bring the startup community together in educational, social and thought-provoking environments.
 
The first event was launched at Cleveland Entrepreneurial Week in November, with speakers on technology, product development, investing and the overall startup community in Cleveland. “The main goal of the entrepreneurial speaker series... Read more >

Dan Mansoor’s 30 years in nonprofit fundraising has taught him one thing. Well, it’s taught him a few things, actually. One is that people think they give to their favorite charities much more often than they actually do. Two: donor retention rates hover around only 40 percent. And three: 80 percent of charitable giving is still motivated by direct mail.
 
Mansoor thought there had to be a better way, one that makes it just as easy to make and track donati... Read more >

When Lisa Reed was coaching clients on health and nutrition out of her Chagrin Falls office, she would always make them a healthy green juice. After time, Reed realized that some of her customers were coming more for the juice than they were for the counseling.
 
The juice, today known as Mean Green, is made with celery, cucumber, kale, spinach, romaine and lemon. “You really feel good because your body becomes alkaline,” explains Reed. “You crave it... Read more >

Eric Klein, chair of the Glickman Urology and Kidney Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, along with a team of researchers at the Clinic and Genomic Health, have developed a genomic test that determines the aggressiveness of prostate cancer and therefore helps doctors and patients decide the proper course of treatment.
 
“It’s a biopsy-based test that looks at how certain genes are turned on or off,” explains Klein. “Before it was developed we ma... Read more >

Michelle Venorsky and Kate Davis have worked at some of the top advertising and communications agencies in town, recently at Marcus Thomas. But the dream of starting their own agency prompted the two, along with three other partners, to launch Hello! agency in September.

“We’ve had this idea brewing for a while now,” says Venorsky. “We absolutely love what we do and we’ve been working together for 10 years.”
 
Hello! focuse... Read more >

On October 28, the Refugee Services Collaborative (RSC) released its first-ever study of the economic impact Cleveland’s 4,500 refugees have made on the region since 2000. Refugees are legal U.S. residents who have come here to avoid persecution in their home countries.
 
"We felt there were a lot of negative misconceptions about refugees, so we commissioned the economic impact study to uncover the facts," says Luanne Bole-Becker, RSC’s special p... Read more >

More than 1,300 people attended the first annual Cleveland Entrepreneurship Week last week, participating in everything from pitch sessions to speaker sessions and after-hours networking events.

Big names in the entrepreneurial community from outside the region, such as MapQuest founder Chris Heivly and managing director of The Startup Factory, were among those in attendance who helped make the event a success.
 
“Overall, ClevelandEW was successfully a... Read more >

Melissa Hale started Yates Apothecary -- a fragrance manufacturer -- on a bit of a whim. She and her husband, Quinn, just had their first child and had moved to Lakewood from Florida, when Hale decided to leave her job as a nuclear medicine technologist and start experimenting with perfumes.

“I spent my last five years as a nuclear med tech working directly with cancer patients and P.E.T. imaging,” recalls Hale. “Those five years took their tol... Read more >

Team NEO, MAGNET, Wire-Net and Medina County Workforce Development came together as a group to secure a $1.8 million federal Make it in America grant, one of only 10 groups nationwide to receive such funding.
 
The money will be used to help local companies that show the potential to bring manufacturing jobs to the region.
 
“We will use the money to boost the growth of 25 medium-sized companies in Northeast Ohio in many areas, from product developm... Read more >

Cleveland Clinic Innovations (CCI) has named seasoned Health Information Technology (HIT) veteran Gary Fingerhut as its new executive director. Fingerhut has more than 30 years of experience as an entrepreneur in IT, co-founding a global software company and as a senior executive of a software development and technology consulting firm.

CCI is the commercial arm of the Cleveland Clinic, responsible for company creation and business development of medical technology develo... Read more >

Since 2008, the Cuyahoga County North Coast Opportunities (NCO) Technology Fund has been helping high growth technology companies thrive and create jobs, and the deadline for the latest round of funding is November 18.
 
NCO provides deferred loans ranging from $25,000 to $125,000 at an interest rate of five percent. Repayment is deferred for five years or until the company receives $1.5 million in follow-on funding. NCO offers six rounds of funding per year, awarding... Read more >

Ann Onusko doesn’t leave the house without first putting on some perfume. “I’ve always been a perfumista,” she says. When she travels with her husband to his native Holland, she hits the perfumeries. “When we go there, the first thing I do is search out the local shops. Same when I go to LA or New York. But Cleveland doesn’t have any perfumeries.”

The fact that Cleveland lacks a perfume shop with scents by small, artisan companies... Read more >

When Sharie Renee opened Cosmic Bobbins on Shaker Square last November, she originally intended for it to be a temporary pop-up shop for the holidays that showcased her handbags made from recycled magazines and other items from local artisans.

A year later, Cosmic Bobbins not only is still going strong as a permanent Shaker Square presence, the store's owner has expanded its offerings and the number of artists it features from 10 to 20 and again to more than 30.
&... Read more >

Abeona Therapeutics, a small biotech startup company that develops therapies for lysomal storage diseases, earned the Global Gene’s Champion of Hope award, along with its partners, for its work in developing therapies for children with Sanfilippo Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder.
 
Abeona, founded earlier this year in Cleveland as a spinoff of Columbus-based Nationwide Children’s Hospital, is developing two products that came out of research at Nationwide... Read more >

The Cleveland Clinic marks its 50th year of successful kidney transplants this year. While the Clinic was not the first to successfully transplant a human kidney, the hospital was, and continues to be, a pioneer in the field.

“There were two earlier transplants,” explains Robert Heyka, interim chair of the department of nephrology and hypertension at the Clinic’s Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute. “One was in New Jersey, but it only lasted 1... Read more >

Brittany Gonzalez and Alicia Candelario started La Banana Frita on a dare from friend and comedian Ramon Rivas. He was having a show at the Grog Shop in Cleveland Heights last May and he wanted his guests to have food. The childhood friends accepted Rivas’ dare and began selling fried plantains, or tostones, at the show.

“We’re by no means chefs,” says Gonzalez. “We just make them like our grandmothers and mothers made them.”  The ... Read more >