I am pleased to announce announce three new business and professional affiliations:
- I have joined the board of directors of ITAC, the Industrial & Technology Assistance Corp. ITAC is a long-standing nonprofit consultancy aimed at helping small and mid-sized manufacturing and technology companies grow and thrive as contributors to a vital NYC economy. It is a node on the federal Manufacturing Extension Partnership network and a Regional Technology Development Center funded by the State of New York. This puts it at the heart of several rapidly accelerating trends such as cleantech and the “maker” movement. The president of ITAC is Sara Garretson, one of the City’s clearest and deepest thinkers about technology-based economic development.
- I am now affiliated as an independent consultant with Public Works Partners, a new management consultancy formed as a merger of two practices with which I have previously worked. Public Works Partners does projects in strategic planning, program design and implementation, process redesign, performance improvement, and financial management for government agencies, institutions of higher education, community-based non-profits, and business corporations. Its principals are (alphabetically) Mark Foggin, Celeste Frye and Scott Zucker, three exceptionally energetic, focused and effective consultants with long experience in and around NYC government and the private sector.
- While I am not primarily a business-development consultant, I do occasionally mentor and advise startups that I find unusually interesting. One such firm I am now advising is Calcbench, a new venture that aims to derive and vend valuable insights from “open data” on public companies made available in XBRL format from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The data challenge is significant, and the backgrounds of principals Pranav Ghai and Alex Rapp — both with deep technical talents and practical experience in the financial sector — strike me as perfectly suited to the task. I have been honored to refer them directly and indirectly to sources of potential financing and partnership, and to render some inside commentary. Keep your eye on these folks, and if you’re interested in finance, sign up at Calcbench for what is (not for long) a free account.
Public Works Partners and Calcbench both maintain blogs (here and here), ITAC can sign you up for emails here, and all three have Twitter accounts (here, here and here).