BURLINGTON — The third week in October is officially Innovation Week in the Queen City.
City officials gathered with business and nonprofit leaders outside City Hall on Wednesday to announce the celebration of Burlington’s technology sector with a week of events Oct. 15-22.
Innovation Week will be bookended by two annual events, HackVT and the Tech Jam. The purpose of Innovation Week is to highlight the social and economic contributions of Vermont’s entrepreneurial and technological “creative ecosystem,” said Michael Schirling, executive director of the nonprofit BTV Ignite.
Those contributions are “not as well known as they could be,” Schirling said at Wednesday’s news conference.
His hope is that the panel discussions, technology demonstrations and computer programming competitions will “enable a collision of ideas” that could yield the next new product or company that will further grow the technology industry in Burlington and the rest of the state, said Schirling, a former Burlington police chief.
Mayor Miro Weinberger said he hopes Innovation Week will be like “Jazz Fest for the tech economy.”
Cathy Resmer, Seven Days associate publisher, said Tech Jam, an annual event hosted by the weekly newspaper that began in 2008, will offer job hunting tips for students, people already in the industry or those considering a career change.
Tech Jam, which will take place at the Champlain Valley Expo on Oct. 21 and 22, will also showcase standout local technology companies.
Tom Torti, president of the Lake Champlain Chamber of Commerce, said despite pessimism about jobs and the economy that get repeated in “the noise of the political season,” Vermont’s technology industry is healthy and growing.
For a full schedule visit the BTV Ignite website.
BTV Ignite is a nonprofit affiliated with US Ignite, a national nonprofit that received a $6 million grant from the White House Office of Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation to help Burlington and 14 other cities leverage their technology infrastructure to spur economic development.
