The session will focus on the journey of a hardware startup founder, and will dive into what it takes to launch a distruptive innovation in the market.
Speakers
Jillian Friot
Partner & Customer Success, Orbit.love
Jillian has a passion for ice cream that's equal to her passion for entrepreneurship and innovation. There's a reason for this - As a business leader, Jillian founded Dolce Friot, a specialty frozen desserts company that built on her prior operations experience in her family's ice cream business, Kimball Farm.
The compassion for founders that Jillian gained from starting her own business led her to join the small team that built the global Startup Program for Dassault Systemes SOLIDWORKS, with a community of over 15,000 startups. Jillian developed strategies and partnerships that now serve those startups, as well as hundreds of Accelerators, Incubators, & Makerspaces and Venture Capital organizations globally. She accomplished through managing relationships and ensuring mutual benefit for the those in the startup ecosystem as well as Dassault's Global Partner Network and internal stakeholders.
A passion for community and innovation is at the heart of Jillian's partnerships and programs.
Jillian brought this passion to Orbit.love to help startups and organizations build meaningful communities with the power of Orbit.love. Jillian is growing the Customer Love Team, which is responsible for guiding customers and startups through Orbit’s “Customer Love Continuum”. The Customer Love Team is focused on ensuring that Orbit customers are successful, supported, and feel the love from the Orbit team.
When not supporting startups and building strategy, you can find Jillian traveling to the best homemade ice cream shops, creating in a FabLab, painting on canvases and flying toward her pilot's license.
Lia Winter
Founder and CEO, Winter Innovations
Lia Winter is the CEO and co-founder of Winter Innovations, a medical device startup developing simple tools for overlooked areas on surgery. Lia’s range of experience in biomedical engineering, academic research, orthopedics R&D, and business give her a unique perspective on developing innovative medical solutions. Lia decided to found Winter Innovations after personal experiences as an athlete and biomedical engineer helped her identify an opportunity to improve orthopedic surgery. Lia and her co-founder are a nationally recognized innovators and entrepreneurs. They have won dozens of pitch competitions (including the 3D Experience World Pitch Battle in 2020), earned government grant funding, raised investment capital, and participated in several accelerator programs. Most recently, the Winter Innovations team obtained FDA clearance for their first product and are in the process of commercial launch.
Lindsey Cox
CEO, LaunchTN
Lindsey Cox is the Chief Executive Officer at Launch Tennessee (LaunchTN), a public-private partnership supporting entrepreneurs and innovation across the state of Tennessee.
A Tennessee native, Lindsey has dedicated her career to the support and acceleration of startups and entrepreneurs in Tennessee and the Southeast. During her first tenure at LaunchTN, she reimagined 3686 Entrepreneurship Festival into a two-day celebration of startup founders, investors and partners, which generated national attention for Tennessee’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. She also created LaunchTN’s government relations team and oversaw the passage and administration of the state’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Matching Program, which to date has deployed \$11M of grants into tech-enabled, Tennessee-based companies.
Lindsey’s experience is vast with tenure at the U.S. Economic Development Administration’s Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Washington, D.C., she led their signature grant program, Build to Scale. To recently, serving as CEO of The Company Lab (CO.LAB) in Chattanooga, TN, where she oversaw the relaunch of Startup Week Chattanooga, revitalized legacy programs and put in place a team positioned to grow Chattanooga’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
