According to statistics released Monday, Boston’s first HUBweek, a weeklong festival that ran from Oct. 3-10, drew more than 46,000 attendees to 106 different events that highlighted the areas the city knows and does best — art, science and technology.
Organized by The Boston Globe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, the program combined leaders in fields ranging from technology to life sciences, according to a Monday statement from HUBweek organizers.
“The idea of HUBweek was to showcase all of the amazing work that is happening across the city,” said Elizabeth Paquette, head of marketing and communications for HUBweek. “So to do that, you need the people that are actually doing it, to be part of it, right?”
And the number of people that are “actually doing it” rose. More than 600 speakers were involved in the variety of HUBweek activities. The presentations focused on five main areas — climate change and sustainability, future of learning and work, art and engagement, social and civic innovation and wellness and healthcare delivery.
Peter Marton, a professor of strategy and innovation at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, said the collision of differing ideas is what made HUBweek the valuable program that it was.
“When we study the difference between good ideas and great ideas, the great ideas are often ideas that have been constructed from different perspectives,” he said.
Many HUBweek activities served as examples of innovation in these vast fields, with programs such as De-Stress Boston pushing people to have conversations about mental health and #BeantownThrowdown to give college students opportunities to get publicity for their start-ups.
However, it was more than just a “direct marketing tool for individual businesses,” Paquette said. HUBweek was meant to be a platform for people to discuss and innovate in conjunction with one another. Often, up front and center on the platform was Boston’s brightest bunch — young entrepreneurs.
“Students always benefit from exposure to new ideas and exposure to new things,” Marton said. “The most innovative thinkers, the most creative people, draw upon the perspectives of others. Out of that comes some of the best ideas of them all.”
#BeantownThrowdown, for example, was an entrepreneurial challenge that gave students three minutes and three slides to deliver a pitch. The winner received over $12,000 in legal services, along with other consulting opportunities. The winning company, PICCPerfect, focused on a combination of comfort and style to help those who need peripherally-inserted central catheter lines lead normal lives.
As a rapidly growing company, PICCPerfect leaders saw HUBweek as a huge step forward for exposure and legal services.
“HUBweek provided us with another audience that we wouldn’t generally seek,” said Emily Levy, a senior at Babson College and the CEO of PICCPerfect. “We usually talk to patients or nurses in hospitals and gift shops. But now we got exposure.”
Since winning #BeantownThrowdown, PICCPerfect has been featured in a number of publications, including BostInno.
Another startup company called Agora won HUBweek’s #Tech4Democracy competition. Agora works to create opportunities for individuals at any level to participate and voice their own ideas on issues happening in their society. Their “online town hall” forum gives people an outlet for direct communication with their representatives. The company works to start a discussion around economic growth, specifically with those at the lower level of the income ladder.
“[#Tech4Democracy] helped us put that discussion forward and get the civic network out there so more people can engage,” said Matthew Patton, Agora’s vice president of operations. “And more people can have civic discussions.”
Since HUBweek, Agora has been in direct contact with Newton Mayor Setti Warren to help continue the civic engagement discussion.
PICCPerfect and Agora are only two of the 250 companies that participated in the weeklong experience, and although each company had individual goals, they all had two things in common — a thirst for innovation and a hunger for inspiration.
“There’s a power in bringing different types of people together and sitting them at the same table,” Paquette said. “[This week] was kind of the tide that rises all boats. If we collectively work together with different organizations and companies to showcase the kind of things that are happening here, we’re going to raise each other up.”
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