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Print Edition StoriesThursday, September 10, 2009
Scvngr, Highland Capital want you to Quest for Innovation for charity
By Rodney H. Brown
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The history of innovation in Massachusetts will be turned into a game on Oct. 9, in an effort to raise funds for Bay State charities. The game, a citywide scavenger hunt, will be driven by the technology behind Scvngr Inc. of Boston.
Information on the game, which kicks off at Boston City Hall Plaza at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 9, can be found at the new site for the game, www.questforinnovation.com, also developed by Scvngr. The game will run for two hours, and organizers are hoping to draw teams from companies and organizations that are part of the modern innovation economy.
According to Scvngr founder and “chief ninja” Seth Priebatsch, the game will have clues that cover the entire history of Massachusetts innovation, from colonial times to discoveries that happened just months ago. Teams will raise funds through pledges, and sponsors have donated either $1,000 or $5,000 to help organize and launch the event.
“It’s a game that spans two hours and 400 years,” Priebatsch said.
The goal of the game is to help foster innovation in the region, and to help alleviate the financial difficulties families and individuals are facing as the recession winds down. The organizers of the event, which include Michael Gaiss, a senior vice president at Highland Capital Partners, which is a backer of Scvngr, have come up with a model for distributing the funds collected from entry fees that is itself innovative.
Of the total raised, 60 percent will go to nonprofits that support business plan competitions, incubators and other programs that encourage entrepreneurship. After that, the remaining 40 percent will go where the game players say it should. Fifteen percent will go where the winning scavenger hunt team wants, 15 percent will go where the team that raised the most pledges wants, and 10 percent will go where all of the participating teams say it should based on a popular vote.
“The point of it is to be able to raise money and funnel some great resources to these awesome nonprofits,” Priebatsch said.
Gaiss said that in addition to the initial spark of the idea to help promote Scvngr, and the end goal of raising as much money as possible to support the community, a third goal is to help celebrate what Massachusetts has accomplished at a time when it is easy to fall into a negative mind set because of the economy.
“The objective here is to do something almost like open-source community,” Gaiss said.
Bringing that community together will also help alleviate a bit of malaise that seems to be in the overall mindset, Gaiss said.
“One of the things that has sort of bugged me over the last few years is the sort of ‘Woe is us’ — and us being the state of Massachusetts — when it comes to us versus California and the vibrancy of those innovation economies,” he said. “So why don’t we use this to celebrate all of the good stuff that has happened over the years. Really put the highlight on innovation and revolutionary advances and entrepreneurship.”
While the game runs from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., the event continues with an after-party, Priebatsch said, which includes a benefit from one of the sponsors, Legal Seafood, which not only donated financial resources, but will supply its New England clam chowder to participants.
According to the website, the primary sponsors for the Quest for Innovation include Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley Bank, WilmerHale, Deloitte, the UMass Boston Venture Development Center, Xconomy, the Museum of Science Boston, the New England Venture Development Center, the MIT Innovation Club and Mass High Tech.
In August, Scvngr announced it had landed $825,000 in funding from Highland Capital Partners in December of 2008. The company has recently gone live with a free version of its mobile phone-based scavenger hunt game, and Priebatsch recognizes the marketing value of the citywide Quest for Innovation.
“From an exposure perspective this sort of meets up nicely with the launch of our free version of our technology,” he said.
The complete list of sponsoring and supporting organizations to date, according to Gaiss, includes Boston College, Boston University, Cambridge Innovation Center, Deloitte, Deshpande Foundation, HBS (Rock Center for Entrepreneurship), MassChallenge, MassNetComms, Mass High Tech, Mass Technology Leadership Council, Microsoft, MIT (Deshpande Center, Entrepreneurship Center, Innovation Club), Museum of Science, NECINA, Northeastern University, New England Venture Capital Association, Olin College of Engineering, Silicon Valley Bank, Suffolk University, TiE-Boston, UMass Boston, WilmerHale, Xconomy and Youth CITIES.
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