WELCOME TO CarbonAccelerator!

Over the past couple of years, I've taken part in a number of business and community competitions where people, young and old, have pitched their ideas for businesses, products, shows, etc. I've also witnessed great success right here in Nova Scotia with young animators starting their own studios, students designing products as projects that morph into commercial reality and people who saw a problem and set out to fix it.

With all those success stories, I've also witnessed a lot of people with half baked ideas that perhaps needed guidance and encouragement to complete the plan and an equal number of would be entrepreneurs that thought they had a business plan but which was never going to work because it was developed in a vacuum.

CarbonAccelerator aims to be a facilitator and community builder for people with ideas to create products, businesses and services right here in Nova Scotia. In addition to the blog, we will host regular face to face presentations where those ideas will be pitched to a group of local business owners, design professionals, guest leaders and the community at large to provide the feedback, guidance and advice that will help them to take their next step to commercial reality.

Many of the people involved with the CarbonAccelerator are involved in local retail shops here in Nova Scotia and as such our first call for ideas is for consumer goods. What are consumer goods? Quite simply, anything you as a consumer would buy in a store. Fashion, housewares, souvenirs, jewellery, snowshoes.....

No idea is too small, but the idea of the CarbonAccelerator is to create businesses that have the ability to grow in scale, to move beyond the "craft fair" with your idea and to foster economic and creative growth right here in Nova Scotia.

What we offer is a critical way of looking at your product or service - is the market really looking for what you have, do competitors exist, does your price point make sense, will retailers want to carry your product, how will you sell your product, how will you market your product.

Think of CarbonAccelerator as more Friendly Giant than Dragon's Den, more Main St. than Bay St. and more community than government. By working together we can make a stronger economy in Nova Scotia, we can create a more sustainable business environment, and we WILL create the next BIG THING - right here, right now.

So, on to the ideas. If you have an idea and want to share it with your community, please post a brief description and we will contact you if it fits into the theme of the next CarbonAccelerator Live event. If you have a problem, or product you wish someone would fix or create right here in Nova Scotia, post that too. If you would like to be involved at any level, please post your intentions as well.

And finally, spread the word - post links to this blog on twitter, tell your friends and dust off your prototypes - we're ready to go.