Nonprofit born out of MIT program seeks to advance Kentucky’s entrepreneurial ecosystem

By Haley Cawthon | KY Inno | October 8, 2021

As a media researcher, Sam Ford was working in collaboration with a few labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016 when he got into a discussion about the future of work.

The native Kentuckian was talking to a world-renowned roboticist who said, “I look at the future of work I see all these possibilities, new technologies and new fields being created, but I feel like there’s a lot of pessimism about the future of work.”

“I just offhandedly said something like, ‘Well, it’s hard to be excited about the future if you don’t think you’re in it,'” Ford recalled. “If you’re in a place like Boston, people are excited about the future of work because they imagine it will happen there. The narrative that often exists is that if you’re in a place like Kentucky, it won’t happen here.”

That conversation eventually led to the founding of AccelerateKY, which is on a mission to connect, inform and inspire.

The nonprofit organization looks to unleash the potential of Kentucky’s innovators and entrepreneurs through generating new stories, relationships and initiatives and, in turn, creating new wealth. It also aims to be a central meeting place where stakeholders from the aforementioned sectors can gather to collaborate on initiatives that strengthen Kentucky’s innovation capacity.

Read the full article here.

By MIT Sloan CDO
MIT Sloan CDO