When you look back five years ago at the first-ever Baltimore Innovation Week, many of the same organizations are involved — the Emerging Technology Centers and TEDCO and Betamore and Mindgrub and TechBreakfast and Startup Maryland and the Digital Harbor Foundation and Venture for America, among others. Some of the people, too.
That won’t surprise anyone. Five years isn’t so long, after all, and great communities are made of people who develop roots within them. Yet we also should judge success of any community by its ability to welcome new people and organizations into the fold. So we’re thrilled by the many groups involved in Baltimore Innovation Week 2016 presented by 14 West, many who weren’t yet there in 2012.
One of the surest and oldest ways communities stay rooted while also seeding new leaders is through tradition. We teach people how to identify as a member of the Baltimore tech, entrepreneurship and innovation community with events and ideas and stories (and your friendly neighborhood tech news site Technical.ly, we hope).
Among those traditions has become Baltimore Innovation Week, this big open calendar of 50+ events at venues across the city and including dozens of partners and hundreds of ideas. We at Technical.ly have always curated its dates and organized some of its primary events, but it’s the broader Baltimore community that contributes most of what should make up this time capsule of the people and organizations and ideas inside the innovation conversation of today.
Baltimore Innovation Week is most certainly more a celebration of where this city can go, but we don’t ignore the importance of where we have been. So explore #BIW16 to think about the future of your business, your career and your city. But know that what we say today was built on four past years (and generations more) that got us here. We hope many of you will remain in the conversation for many more years to come and will welcome new faces in along the way.
With warm regards,
Christopher Wink and the entire Technical.ly team
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