I grew up in rural North Carolina. After graduation from UNC, I moved to New York City for a six-month internship. It worked out, I stayed thirty years. In the course of my career: I've been a student, a researcher, a designer, an inventor, a manufacturer, a marketer, a retailer, and an entrepreneur.

Looking back, I've been successful; and more than once, I've had to dust myself off and start again.

I've made money; I've lost money. I've tied my well-being to my dreams. All of these personal experiences lead me to see - for those of us in the innovation industry - a better way-to-market for ideas.

Everyday, someone asks me, so why Cleveland? Well folks, Cleveland is like living in Disneyland for a garage inventor like me. I've learned the hard way: an idea goes nowhere without process people. And Cleveland is a land of opportunity.

I was looking for a manufacturing culture - working people with community-based values, a ready and able community of support services, and a high concentration of contract manufacturers with excess capacity to sell.

With the opening of Garage Inventor Live, my dream, a community that assembles innovation came to life.

We are building a community of inventors, process people, and manufacturers, appropriately aligned with on the ground economic development leaders. This mindset - a supply chain for the American inventor - can refuel our economy, create new jobs and leave our children the legacy of the American dream.

So where do we start?

This community seeks to correct the disadvantage that independent inventors must overcome relative to big business. Independent inventors for the most part, don't have a process, and consequently, they don't have a relationship with the service people who they need to get the product development job done. Having spent a career working in New York City designing consumer products and making them production-ready, I have come to realize that new product development tools and resources are skewed to favor enterprise-based businesses that are companies organized by task, a way of streamlining and processing innovation.

Getting new products to market is an overwhelming task for the independent inventor. But it is much less so for big business. They have people on staff to assign projects -that have idea people, research and development people, product design people, engineers, production people, attorneys, and marketing people.

Simply put, big business is prepared to cover the bases from start to finish. While inventors and many contract and component manufacturers, who became accustom to working with Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) doing those jobs, have none of these advantages.

Isn't it time we cultivate the American Inventor?

And so my move to Northeast Ohio, to be on the front lines of a manufacturing community looking for orders, was my first step in doing so.

Joining this manufacturing community is your first step to being a part of the solution to the American economic downturn. I'm inviting you; become a part of the renaissance in contract manufacturing.

Together, let us "Re-invent, "Made in USA".

Excerpts taken from speech given by Mary Kaye Denning on the opening day of Garage Inventor Live at NASA Glenn Research Center, Building 500 Auditorium in Cleveland, OH August 12, 2008.  

Transcript of speech launching Garage Inventor Live

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