Sarah Biller is the Executive Director of Vantage Ventures, an initiative of the John Chambers College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University that focuses on launching high impact, scalable businesses that tackle complex challenges.

Prior to Vantage Sarah was a very successful entrepreneur, and co-founded Capital Market Exchange, a predictive analytics platform for institutional bond investors. Sarah was most recently the Chief Operating Officer for Innovation at State Street Bank’s Global Exchange division.  She is recognized around the world for her expertise in financial technology, and many in West Virginia consider her one of the most important players in West Virginia’s developing entrepreneurship landscape.

Sarah grew up in Hurricane, WV, went to WVU, and took various consulting and management positions with technology firms in Washington , D.C. before moving to Boston, where she started and sold two of her own start-ups. She knows the value of collaboration and believes strongly that the solution to building a young entrepreneurial class in West Virginia cannot be found in a vacuum where one or two entities control the state’s entrepreneurial landscape. In her words, it’s about who is in the boat with you. With that, this is the story of Sarah Biller and Help.

Kevin Combs has a passion for small town entrepreneurs. As a native West Virginian who grew up in Fayette County, he’s another expat who left the state, made it big and now wants to give back. In addition to being the Chief Executive Officer of a new company called Molecular Biologicals, Combs is the founding member of the Country Roads Angel Network which, as the name indicates, focuses on bringing start-up funding to small businesses and entrepreneurs in rural Appalachia, especially West Virginia.

Combs’ early career took him to Charlottesville, Virginia and++ he still lives today. But his mind and work with the angel network brings him back to West Virginia and his family’s farm in Elkins every month. My conversation with Combs was one of the most enjoyable I’ve had in a while.  He’s passionate, dedicated, and we share a vision for West Virginia’s future that builds on our culture and strengths.  There’s no such thing as a roadblock to Kevin Combs.  In his mind, grit and determination can conquer all. So in this episode of i3 Talk, we look at the one thing every entrepreneur needs to succeed.

Grit.

Matt Eversmann is a retired Army ranger whose 20-plus year career took him to some of the world's hardest places. In 1993, Matt was serving with Task Force Ranger in Operation Gothic Serpent when his unit fought one of the bloodiest gun battles the U.S. Army had seen since Vietnam. By the time it was over, 18 U.S. soldiers were dead and another 80 wounded. For the record though, the Rangers gave more than they got. According to one source, the Somali militia whose leaders were the target of the raid sustained at least 315 dead and 812 wounded. It was a pivotal moment for the U.S. military that was later captured in the movie Black Hawk Down.

Matt deployed once again in 2006 as part of the surge of forces into Iraq and saw combat in a different form. Since retiring in 2008, he has dedicated his life to helping veterans and their employers understand the transition process that soldiers go through when leaving the service.

Whether it was taking care of soldiers in the heat of a gunfight, or managing his small business, Matt Eversmann knows more than most how important agility is to to leaders and entrepreneurs.  I spoke with him to learn more about his history, and how he has had to adjust to changing situations both in combat, and in the civilian world.

The fact is that entrepreneurship and risk go hand in hand, and how we deal with it depends on who we are, our life experiences, and our ability to handle the stress that goes along with stepping onto a path that leads to an uncertain future.  The truth is, becoming a successful entrepreneur requires the adoption of risk and that requires a certain amount of courage, but courage without the risk of loss is just a word.  Few people know this better than the four successful entrepreneurs who are featured in today’s episode of i3 Talk.  They all have a common experience that only 7.6% of U.S. citizens can put on the professional resumes, and they all attribute their success in business, at least in part, to this this one chapter in their personal stories. So what do they have in common? They are all veterans of elite units in the U.S. military.  All four have experienced levels of risk that few of us can even imagine. After they left the military, they leveraged that experience and the mental toughness it created, to build incredible businesses outside of the military. They each have amazing stories.

Featuring:

• Mike Durant
• Matt Griffin
• Tim Kennedy
• Alex West

Ideas are funny things. I’ve spent most of my life believing I was an idea guy. A person who sees things that others don’t. As I’ve grown older, I’m not so sure that’s true. It’s been said that in today’s world where billions of people are connected, the odds of one person having a truly unique idea are incredibly small. You see, in theory, all information is equally available to everyone who has an internet connection and a smartphone. So if two people are interested in the same subject and see the same information, it stands to reason that the likelihood of them both coming up with the same idea is pretty high. But even if someone else across the planet, or across town is thinking about the same new idea, that doesn’t mean both will act on it. In fact, most won’t. The risk is often too high, and the reward is speculative at best.

But that doesn’t stop the people who want to change the world with ideas. For these individuals, the pursuit of manifesting an original thought drives them forward. Most of the time, they fail usually because no one around them tells them that their brilliant idea is actually a really dumb idea. Sometimes though, new ideas succeed, and when they do in a big way, economies are reshaped, communities are transformed, and the world takes notice.

Many parts of Middle America are looking for ways to create idea economies that reproduce entrepreneurs like colleges and universities produce engineers, doctors, and lawyers on a large scale. But doing that assumes there’s a process for creating great ideas that can be packaged-up and repeated time and again. Identifying that process is the holy grail of entrepreneurship educators and business leaders alike. Especially in areas of the country that have lagged behind in the 21^st century economy. Capturing innovation and using it as a tool for economic development is seen as THE key to Middle America’s future.

So, where do great ideas come from? Can they be mass produced, and how can bad ideas be killed off before some wayward entrepreneur loses his life savings building a business making things no one wants? That’s the story of ideas.

What if the design thinking process just doesn’t feel right? What if your bug list has given you an idea for a business that, in spite of what potential customers say, your gut tells you that it’s a great idea and you should run with it? Or, stated another way, what role should data play in your entrepreneurial decisions? Dr. Brad Price might have an answer. Price is an assistant professor of Business Data Analytics at West Virginia University’s John Chambers College of Business and Economics.

Dr. Roger Beaty is an assistant professor of psychology at Penn State University who specializes in analyzing how the brain creates and processes ideas. In many of his experiments, he and his team use a functional MRI to measure blood flow to different parts of the brain as volunteer test subjects work their way through various problem-solving exercises.  Through this process, Beaty has actually come very close to mapping what positive ideas look like when someone is brainstorming.

This is the long version of my interview with Dr. Roni Reiter-Palman.

So why are some people convinced that they aren’t creative and therefore can’t develop good ideas? Well, according to Dr. Roni Reiter-Palmon, a lot of it has to do with the limitations we place on ourselves as we think about problems. She is an organizational psychologist at the University of Nebraska, Omaha and focuses on creativity and innovation in the workplace.

Dr. Ben Eng is an Associate Professor of marketing at Marshall University in Huntington, WV and specializes in an innovation process called design thinking. Basically, design thinking helps entrepreneurs identify problems they are passionate about, innovate solutions to solve those problems, and then test those solutions with potential customers before ever going to market. This allows new companies to avoid investing huge amounts of money building businesses or products that no one wants to buy.

Though it comes in many forms, Eng learned his methodology at Intuit, the financial services software company in Silicon Valley. It’s not a coincidence, by the way, that the Executive Chairman of Intuit’s board of directors is a man named Brad Smith, a native of West Virginia who has invested heavily in expanding entrepreneurship education in his home state.