The Cuyahoga County Next Generation Council (NGC) will host Spark Plug, an event to celebrate small business growth and the region’s many opportunities for funding and growth, June 6 at Negative Space Gallery. The event kicks off Small Business Incubator Month.
 
“Spark Plug is focused on small business accelerators and incubators,” says Tammy Oliver, program organizer and a member of NGC. “It brings together all of the amazing resources we hav... Read more >

As cities continue to become more bike-friendly, new bike-based businesses are springing up to support the movement. These bike-centric businesses are both banking on and promoting a growing interest in riding, and in the process they are boosting their cities' economies.

If it's up to Rachel Wilkins Patel, fathers and daughters will create something cool together this Father's Day.

Patel is founder HER Ideas in Motion, Northeast Ohio’s first technology and media program for girls. On June 15, the nonprofit will host a Father-Daughter HackDay featuring hands-on activities and career role-modeling for girls ages 11-14 interested in STEM-focused studies. Participants will create their own projects under the tutelage of female t... Read more >

Bizdom Cleveland has invested in 16 young companies since it set up shop in January 2012, and the organization is targeting 18 more companies this year. While many of the companies are local startups, Bizdom also scours the country in search of promising businesses to recruit to Cleveland.

So far Bizdom has brought four companies to Cleveland: Queryly from New York, MascotSecret from San Francisco, Firmly Planted from Los Angeles and CourseBuffet from Seattle.
 <... Read more >

The Brain Gain Cleveland Project (BGCP) has teamed up with the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association to stage a lunchtime pep rally for the city they love.

The rally will be hosted by the legal organization and serve as its annual meeting, just with a far more diverse crowd than usual, says Debra Mayers Hollander, deputy director of scouting for BGCP.

Hollander is expecting 1,000 guests to make it to the floor of Quicken Loans Arena for the June 28 event. A... Read more >

The Tall Ships are sailing back into the Cleveland harbor this summer, and are going to need some volunteers to stay afloat.

Okay, nobody will be hoisting the mizzenmast or lifting any bales, but there is a call for greeters, ticket takers, crowd control marshals, hospitality workers, docents, and more once the four-day event kicks off on July 3.

The Tall Ships Festival, returning to the lakefront for the first time since 2010,  is being organized and presen... Read more >

Building on the success of the book “Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology,” a collection of essays and images about Cleveland edited by Anne Trubek and Richey Piiparinen, and subsequent blog, the publishers announced that they will launch an online magazine, Belt, this coming September.

“There was so much interest in 'Rust Belt Chic' that we really wanted to continue to have a space for people to contribute,” says Belt editor-in-chief Tr... Read more >

Jewels Johnson dabbled in a few different career paths before she found her true calling: baked goods. She grew up in Shaker Heights, went off to London, Charlotte, Las Vegas and Chicago before returning to Shaker in 2006 to work as a teacher at Shaker Heights High School.
 
Then, in 2011, armed with her grandmother’s recipe box, Johnson opened Sugar Plum Cake Company. “I’m a self-taught baker; my grandmother taught my mom and my mom taught me,&rdquo... Read more >

Last month Trinity Health, the fourth largest Catholic healthcare system in the country, hired Explorys to manage its healthcare data analytics in its hospitals, outpatient facilities and other facilities. Trinity will implement Explorys’ suite of cloud-based big data analytics solutions to manage the company’s clinical data.

The deal puts Explorys, which already is a leader in big data, on top in the clinical data market. Explorys has been rapidly growing sin... Read more >

When every sector of a populace thrives, so does the community as a whole. The local chapter of a national philanthropic organization plans to shine a light on this and other issues during a series of programs in 2013.

Philanthropic support of black male achievement will be the subject of the Foundation Center's first Rising Tide program on May 22, says director Cindy Bailie. Nearly every major indicator of economic, social and physical well-being shows that black men... Read more >

Soccer, creative writing and volunteerism might seem like an odd mix, just don't tell that to the students helped by America SCORES Cleveland, an organization that has been providing unique after-school programming for almost 10 years.

The local chapter of America SCORES, which launched in 2004, serves more than 500 youths in 10 Cleveland public schools. The program is designed to create "poet-athletes" through an innovative triple threat of soccer, poetry a... Read more >

When Geoff Thorpe founded NDI Medical in 2002 with his neurostimulation device for bladder control, he saw a market with a lot of potential. The company sold its MEDSTIM device to Medtronic in 2008, kept the NDI name and branched into developing and commercializing new neurostimulation device companies.
 
The move has proved successful. NDI has launched two companies and has grown to 32 employees, 21 of whom work in NDI’s Cleveland headquarters. The company... Read more >

Nine young Northeast Ohio businesses were inducted into the Charter One Launch100 Leadership Circle on April 25. Local inductees included Nicole Zmij, CEO of Amplified Wind Solutions in Cleveland, Lindsay Sims, founder and CEO of Renter’s BOOM, Lissette Rivera, founder of SafeCare, all in Cleveland, and Shaquita Graham, CEO of King J Transportation in South Euclid.

“The Launch100 Leadership Circle really focuses on minority entrepreneurs and encourages them to... Read more >

Building off the buzz created by Shaker LaunchHouse, an entrepreneurial incubator, the City of Shaker Heights has partnered with LaunchHouse, Cuyahoga County and Neighborhood Housing Services of Greater Cleveland to renovate two homes on Chelton Road into affordable housing for entrepreneurs.

The homes at 3553 and 3599 Chelton Road, directly behind Shaker Launchhouse in the South Moreland neighborhood, were vacant before the city acquired them. Shaker renovated the homes ... Read more >